The Godfather: Peter Corris on myths busted
Robin Hood and Little John they both have gone to the fair ’o … When I was a child my mother made a point of visiting Cheshire’s bookshop in Melbourne on her excursions to the city and buying one of the Cheshire’s Children’s Classics. These were cheap, stapled,...
BARBARA EHRENREICH Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America & the world. Reviewed by Adrian Phoon
Is positive thinking bad for you? Essayist Barbara Ehrenreich thinks so. Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America & the world might sound positively (or negatively) Grinch-like. But Barbara Ehrenreich, who previously wrote a book about the history of...
Summer Reading Giveaway #4
This draw is now closed. Congratulations to our winner, Suzie Elovalis from WA! Kirsty Murray The Year it all Ended For 17-year-old Tiney everything is about to change as the bells toll for Armistice Day, 1918. With the end of the war and the beginning of the...
LYDIA DAVIS Can’t and Won’t. Reviewed by Phoebe Chen
In her ninth collection of flash fiction Lydia Davis writes with complex emotional ambiguity about the spaces in between. Lydia Davis began her career as a translator of French literature, and perhaps as a kind of reprieve from the unwieldy sentences...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on The Gulliver Fortune
I’m sometimes asked which of my books has meant the most to me. My glib answer, because it made me the most money, has been The Empty Beach, the fifth Cliff Hardy book, which went through three or four printings before it was filmed. Although the film was a failure,...
JULIAN DAVIES Crow Mellow. Reviewed by Michael Richardson
This deliberately strange and inventive homage to Aldous Huxley is a novel of ideas that will draw each reader in differently. Crow Mellow makes no secret of its strangeness. The book is narrower in size than normal, the author’s name in small type, just two sentences...
Summer Reading Giveaway #3
This competition is now closed. Congratulations to the winner, Colleen Burke from Newtown! Christos Tsiolkas Merciless Gods The first collection of short stories from the prize-winning author of The Slap and Barracuda. ‘… while Merciless Gods seethes with...
SA JONES Isabelle of the Moon & Stars. Reviewed by Deborah J Sheil
A young woman searches for peace of mind as a past trauma refuses to stay buried in SA Jones’s new novel. Isabelle is a data analyst in the corporate world in Perth. After a promising start in the company, she is effectively derailed by an embarrassing mental meltdown...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Elvis
In a column last year I expressed the opinion that Elvis Presley was one of the two greatest popular singers of the 20th century. The other, incontestably, was Frank Sinatra. Sinatra brought an insouciant, louche intimacy to crooning that hadn’t been there before. He...
ROBERT BAUSCH Far As the Eye Can See. Reviewed by Peter Corris
Much more than just a satisfying Western adventure story, this novel is also an emotional map of the country. The Western novel has had a distinctive and distinguished place in American literature, from the time of James Fennimore Cooper to the present. The first...
Summer Reading Giveaway #2
This competition is now closed. Congratulations to the winner, Michelle Hostrup from Redfern! Sheila Hancock Miss Carter’s War Actor Sheila Hancock’s debut novel opens in 1948: young Marguerite Carter has survived a terrifying war, and becomes one of the...
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