Luke Carman

A Lotus with a A Long Stalk

Luke Carman reviews Hospital, Sanya Rushdi’s novel about a linguist’s experience of psychosis and institutionalisation. As Carman argues, Rushdi’s ‘minimalist’ style underlines ‘a contingent relationship to sanity’ to which we are all vulnerable.

A Glovebox of One’s Own

By some cosmic sophomoric prank, despite my desire to become what some people call a writer, my true occupation on this earth has always been and always will be captured by the construction ‘a car-man is a car-man is a car-man is a car-man’, and i...

A Drenched Texture

Like so many writers, I turned to this paltry profession precisely because I couldn’t handle the other, more demanding dimensions of life. As a demographic, writers struggle with what others regard as ‘reality’, and we are thereby driven to provid...

In the Room with Gerald Murnane

There’s nothing superior about a critic who does not know their material, and there’s no excuse for professional readers whose memories for fiction are faulty, but I’d hoped my usual need to plaster over lapses in attention would be less laborious...

A Northern Rivers Romance

I began to imagine the landscape of Byron Bay, so as to rehearse in advance the pitfalls awaiting. For a setting: the vague image of a beach somewhere: a bright sun and a long curving beach populated by tourists in shorts and thongs, the air stink...

Tender Maulings

Six Degrees from the City: Episode 5 – Luke Carman

'When my collection, An Elegant Young Man came out, I think it virtually sent me around the bend.'

Under New Management

The voices and stories of Ahmad, Polites and Carman work incredibly well together to create an interwoven picture of the lives of these young men in the suburbs of their youth. In this respect, Three Jerks cuts through the homogeneity of media ima...

Beat Poet Kool-Aid: An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman

The decision to write in a semi-autobiographical style raises inevitable questions. Is this fiction or autobiography? To what degree can we speak of the narrator ‘Luke Carman’ as a ‘character’ in the author Luke Carman’s collection of vignettes?