by NRB | 23 Jan 2025 | Non-fiction |
Helen Garner’s account of a single season of her grandson’s AFL team is about more than football. Helen Garner may have begun her career as a novelist, but she has long been admired for her non-fiction, which has been defined by its fearless honesty and unflinching...
by NRB | 1 Sep 2017 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 9 Jun 2017 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 16 Mar 2017 | Non-fiction |
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...
by NRB | 11 Nov 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 24 May 2016 | Non-fiction |
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...
by NRB | 29 Oct 2015 | Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 21 Aug 2014 | Crime Scene |
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...
by NRB | 2 Nov 2012 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...