‘Now I know what I’ve been faking all these years.’ So says Private Benjamin in the film of the same name, after a tryst with her lover. I felt this way about my first independent bookshop. I had been making all the right noises for years, but suddenly I realised what I was missing. Growing up in a provincial town, literary choices were thin: the mall bookshop in the next, bigger town, the newsagency, or my parents. I picked up The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes in the first, and Eric van Lustbader’s The Ninja in the second. (Learning about… [Read more]
What I’m Reading – Emma Marie Jones
Attraction is distraction. Or is it the other way around? Like so many shopaholics I can’t resist the gleaming appeal of an object, and the objects I desire most are stories, which are not tangible objects but can of course be made so, and once they are I must have them. Do you remember the part in Disney’s The Little Mermaid where Ariel has a private grotto full of junk she treasures? A conch shell; a beheaded statue of a man, thrusting a sword heroic? Like books, to Ariel these objects hold stories. Objects are so captivating, and this is… [Read more]
What I’m Reading – Brodie Lancaster
I can’t finish anything I start, and I’m always stressed about money. These two things are often disparate, but they intersect in the tumbling piles of books next to my bed and on my dresser and next to the toilet and on the coffee table and on my desk. Towers that signify money spent and things unfinished. I just bought volume 2 of Bitch Planet, a graphic novel that’s billed as ‘Margaret Atwood meets Inglorious Basterds’. It’s by Image Comics who also publish Saga, a series I got so instantly obsessed with, I started googling “saga + tattoos”. The results… [Read more]
What I’m Reading – Sam van Zweden
It feels good to read books set in or originating from the places you visit – the added depth creates something like immersion; an extra layer of understanding. This works in both directions – your understanding of the book is tied up forever with your experience of the city. In London, I read A Room of One’s Own. In it, Virginia Woolf describes London as being ‘like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern.’ Running the foot race that is the first week of a holiday, with its equal… [Read more]
What I’m Reading – Else Fitzgerald
I’m reading tweets from space. More specifically, the twitter feed of @VanguardAdrift, part of an interactive art experience I read about in an article titled ‘Tweet me, I’m About to Die in Space’ (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2120497-tweet-me-im-about-to-die-in-space/). Artists Cath Le Couteur and Nick Ryan’s Project Adrift incorporates a combination of film, soundscape, and twitter feeds to explore the ‘lives’ of space junk, of which there are now more than 170 million pieces in orbit around the Earth. The oldest surviving man-made space object still in orbit, Vanguard 1, tweets updates about its journey around Earth at 21,630km/h. As I’m writing this, it tweets… [Read more]
Songs of the Kookaburra giveaway
For the month of June any new Meanjin print subscription or print renewal comes with an added bonus: a classic – and controversial – volume from the lost history of Australian letters. We are reprinting Maud Hepplestone’s Songs Of The Kookaburra, a vanished treasure brought back to public attention in our June edition, thanks to author Ryan O’Neill. Read all about Ryan’s discovery, the extraordinary story of Songs Of The Kookaburra here. A lost classic of bush poetry in the tradition of Paterson, or a breakthrough gesture in literary modernism? You be the judge. As O’Neill writes: Upon its… [Read more]
What I’m Reading – Robyn Annear
My office is a lead-lined bunker, impervious to signals from without; the danger, therefore, dwells within. All I keep on my desk are two dictionaries and a thesaurus, but even a dictionary, I’ve found, can devour an hour or two. Words beginning with F or N in particular are spell-binding when there’s a deadline approaching. Lately, I made the mistake of allowing a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (188X) to infiltrate the bunker. It’s an old small-format hardback with a maroon leatherette cover, perfect for the pocket when walking. I was reading it… [Read more]
A lost treasure of Australian letters: Songs of the Kookaburra
Writing for June Meanjin (in shops June 19, or subscribe), Ryan O’Neill tells of an extraordinary discovery: the lost, quietly tragic, tale of Maud Hepplestone, and her collection The Songs of the Kookaburra, a work celebrated as a masterwork of modernism, when its author intended anything but. Ryan takes up the tale: ‘Australian poetry was once memorably characterised by the poet John Forbes as ‘a knife fight in a phone booth’, and one of the earliest twists of the blade can be found in Maud Hepplestone’s collection, Songs of the Kookaburra. Like almost all dead Australian poets (and most living… [Read more]
What I’m Reading – David McInnis
I’m on sabbatical at present, and my reading is skewed towards my research on lost plays from Shakespeare’s England. The overwhelming majority of plays written and performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime have not survived. We know of at least 744 by name but estimate that a further 1700 or more must have been written in order for the commercial playing companies in London to have enough titles in their repertories to remain competitive in the marketplace. Against these staggering figures for the lost plays, we know of only a paltry 543 plays that have actually survived (Shakespeare being responsible for about… [Read more]
What I’m Reading – Kate Ryan
While at times my reading style is a little meandering, moving between two or three novels, maybe a memoir or an essay, a range of things that are almost but not quite capturing me, other books take me by the throat and do not let me go. Two brilliant debut novels, Idaho by Emily Ruskovich and History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, grabbed me in this compulsive violent way, and indeed forms of violence are at the core of both novels, though to reduce their scope to this alone does not do justice to either. Idaho explores an unspeakable act… [Read more]
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