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]

Like a lot of people I know, I expect to die under my pile of my ‘to read’ books. Deciding what to read next is arduous. You don’t want to start and not finish. But, at the same time, you don’t want to start one that kind of sucks and find yourself forcing your way through it or tricking yourself into thinking you know how to speed read. I also don’t like to rely solely on the books I own but haven’t read. I like to buy new ones, keep my collection fresh. Buying new books ensures that I continue… [Read more]

Having failed in yet another attempt to attract Australia Council funding (this makes three rejections in six months: a pattern?), we here at Meanjin took a moment or two to consider our finances. We’ve been lucky to receive a recent boost in our support from the University of Melbourne, and will continue to make applications for other funding as best we can. Meantime, we thought it timely to have a look at the amount we charge for subscriptions and retail purchase of Meanjin. So we thought, and we thought, and we decided to leave things as they are for our… [Read more]

It was Paul Kelly who led me to read Raymond Carver. It was the early 90s, and my head had been stuck in a magic realist place for a while. I’d read loads of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the 80s and wanted to be him, right up until I read Jorge Luis Borges. And wanted to be him. I chased after them with less chance of catching them than a three-legged dog on a freeway going after cars. For me, the 80s was mostly a view of their taillights fading into the distance. And, okay, also Kafka’s. Then I read… [Read more]

I’ve heard people say that doing a PhD can permanently kill your interest in the topic of your study. Not for me. I had the good fortune to pick a topic where there’s never a dull moment: overseas commercial surrogacy. Six months after I started my PhD, two surrogacy scandals broke in Thailand; one involving abandoned twin Baby Gammy, the other a Japanese businessman alleged to have fathered 19 children by Thai surrogates. This was followed by news of another twin born through surrogacy abandoned by his Australian parents in India. More recently, there was the arrest in Cambodia of… [Read more]

I recently returned from the Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF) in India. The festival was full of writers I knew and loved, and writers I didn’t know whose work I chanced upon. Here are just a few of the treasures from GALF 2016 that would have been hard to find in Australia. – I encountered the work of Abeer Y. Hoque for the first time at GALF when I bought her memoir Olive Witch (2016), and her collection of short stories The Lovers and the Leavers (2014). Olive Witch is the story of Hoque’s many journeys, between Nigeria, Bangladesh,… [Read more]

I recently finished reading Never Never by James Patterson and Candice Fox. Never Never is a large, heavy paperback, wrapped in the vibrant hues that signal the Australian desert as well as the thriller genre. The taglines on the book jump out at me: my favourite one promises that ‘the pages turn themselves’. Patterson, the world’s highest earning author last year, is an entrepreneurial force in the publishing industry and Fox is a multi-award-winning Australian crime author, so Never Never is a fascinating collaboration for people interested in contemporary Australian crime writing. The novel’s protagonist is the spiky, sweary Detective… [Read more]

The box of books I pack to take to the beach for our three-week summer camping trip is ambitious to say the least. It is ambitious in terms of time (and maybe content); the summers where I devoured up to twenty novels during our beachside hiatus are long gone. These days, reading time is snatched in precarious two-minute lots when one of the other parents has eyes on the kids in the water, or is attempted in the last drifting minutes before I give in to ocean-lulled sleep. I pack for myself, for my family, and for the friends who… [Read more]