Reviewed: Jackie Ess, Darryl, Clash Books There’s an uncanny way in which certain ‘queer novels’ can quickly become a thing of folk legend, surpassing even word-of-mouth to become inoculable. Neither good press nor criticism can necessarily move it. Those ‘in’ on the secret may (annoyingly) regard themselves as sybaritic, chosen for a kind of sainthood. Books such as Bluets (Maggie Nelson) or Autobiography of Red (Anne Carson) become doomed to a sort of possessiveness. Accessorised ...
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Reviewed: Anke Stelling, Higher Ground, Scribe In Bodentiefe Fenster (2015), Anke Stelling’s second novel, a woman called Sandra lives in an alternative housing project in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. So did Stelling at the time of writing. The book is a critique of the class ignorance and privilege embedded in Sandra’s social circle, comprising mostly artists.While I can’t read German and thus have never read the book, according to Stelling, via an online translator, she ‘grew ...
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Reviewed: Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts, Catapult Hassan messaged me in February. I was in Berlin, he was in Melbourne. He had read an excerpt of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and, being a little tipsy, suggested that we review it together. It was a book about moving to Berlin, which was something I had done and Hassan was determined never to do. We thought this might mean we’d bring different frames of reference to the review ...
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Reviewed: Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void, Nightboat Books The dream begins in the middle of things. And as in dreams, the poems in The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void begin and are on the run before we can place them. But this disorientation is familiar—in our dream lives we are thrust into the uncanny without experiencing it as such; we are often ...
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Reviewed: Graham Greene, The Quiet American, Penguin Before he travelled the world, met Fidel Castro, and became one of the greatest chroniclers of the twentieth-century man’s consciousness, Graham Greene was an unpopular schoolboy prone to bouts of depression. He once swallowed a handful of aspirin pills and went swimming in the school pool, hoping to lose consciousness and drown. Neither of those things happened; he received several weeks of detention for trying. Whether it was ...
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Reviewed: Randa Abdel-Fattah, Coming of Age in the War on Terror, NewSouth Publishing It has always been post-9/11 for me. I was born on a Thursday in 2005. I called Western Sydney my first home. I have navigated this nation, albeit for a short time, in a body with identities that are already politicised. Emerging into young adulthood as a brown, Muslim girl has required me to understand and analyse how I am perceived by individuals ...
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Reviewed: Briohny Doyle, Echolalia, Vintage Set in a near future where 50-degree summers bully the horizon, Briohny Doyle’s second novel, Echolalia, sprawls among psychothriller, crime, speculative and literary fiction to make a highly original mark on the publishing landscape as she wrestles with and departs from the tropes of those genres. The Cormac family are the owners of a small property empire in the fictional town of Shorehaven, where a lake is slowly drying up. When ...
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Reviewed: Martin McKenzie-Murray, The Speechwriter, Scribe Early in The Speechwriter, I encounter a scenario where Donald Trump instructs Don Jr to ‘hijack Air Force Two and suicidally steer the plane into Disneyland … Congress is still split on impeachment.’ As I read it for the first time shortly after Joe Biden’s inauguration—by that point just a month after the storming of the US Capitol by right-wing men dressed in fur and horned helmets, with debate ...
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