Nick Cave’s latest novel, is called The Death of Bunny Munro. It’s due for an August release and is published by Text Publishing. To celebrate its release Meanjin is running a long essay by Mark Mordue on the life and work of Cave in its September edition, alongside a design essay by Mary Callahan on her work designing Nick Cave Stories. The Death of Bunny Munro is about a man who sits in a hotel and masturbates fantasising about vaginas. This is the cover. The image takes the old adage that sex sells though that, in itself, isn’t the problem… [Read more]
On the Wire
Last week, I came across this article in the New York Observer, which effectively raises the question ‘do novelists have a duty to write more about contemporary social issues?’ Walter Benn Michaels, a professor of American literature and theory at the University of Illinois, was quoted as saying on a public panel that fiction should be more like US TV show The Wire, which for five seasons accurately portrayed various aspects of life in modern-day Baltimore, from the drug trade to the school system to the print media and so on. In an essay previously published on bookforum.com, Michaels argued… [Read more]