The Godfather: Peter Corris on the short story story
As an undergraduate I wrote self-regarding verses (I can’t dignify them as poems), which I submitted to student magazine editors who rightly rejected them. As a postgraduate I tried writing short stories. They were derivative of Hemingway and Maugham and were also...
Random Thoughts: On teaching writing. By Jean Bedford
Godfather Peter Corris is still on a sickie, though we hope he’ll be back soon (this column-writing lark is harder than it looks). Meanwhile NRB Editors continue to share their random thoughts. This week Jean Bedford talks about teaching writing and gives...
CAROLINE BAUM Only: A singular memoir. Reviewed by Shelley McInnis
Baum’s memoir is replete with examples of emotional deftness of the highest order. I have very much enjoyed Caroline Baum’s published essays, and it is a delight to see two of them appearing as familiar landmarks in this big map of a memoir. One, entitled...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on reviewing
I must have written hundreds of book reviews. I cut my teeth at the business when I was an academic, reviewing books in the fields of my own research – race relations in Australia and the Pacific. I was lucky; these were popular areas of research and published writing...
HELEN GARNER Everywhere I Look. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
The Helen Garner of Everywhere I Look is as contradictory as she’s ever been in this collection brimming with highlights. At the opening event of the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival, Helen Garner read from her then newly released book about the trial of Robert...
MILES ALLINSON Fever of Animals. Reviewed by Joshua Barnes
Weird, audacious, paradoxical and strange – this novel of a writer’s search for a missing painter offers much to think about. In the first pages of Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust describes the tendency of his narrator – also named Marcel – to fall asleep while reading in...
Crime Scene: HELEN GARNER This House of Grief: The story of a murder trial. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
Questions of masculinity and notions of guilt and innocence are probed in Helen Garner’s disquieting examination of the tragic death of three young boys and the murder trial of their father. Most Australians will be familiar with the high-profile case at the...The Godfather: Peter Corris on finding the titles
Getting titles right is important. I remember a stand-up comic speculating on how novels with titles like Mister Zhivago or The Sun also Sets would have fared. How about Lucky James? The working title I had for the first Cliff Hardy book was so bad it could have...
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