Readings.com.au: Writers Festival Highlights

Wolf At The Table

From the number one New York Times bestselling author of Running with Scissors comes an hilarious, frightening and compulsively readable new memoir.

Unfinished Business: Paul Keating's Interrupted Revolution

In the early 1980s, Paul Keating set out to reinvent the Australian economy. He floated the Australian dollar, liberated banking and finance from its regulatory shackles, and — most significantly — introduced a universal superannuation scheme. The results were astounding growth in the value of the national economy and in the personal wealth of ordinary Australians.

Keating’s revolution was based on his insight that, by encouraging every citizen to save for retirement, a huge pool of investment capital would be created that would help enrich the nation. But the fulfillment of his vision was denied by his political opponents after the Australian people voted Keating out in 1996.

In Unfinished Business, David Love, a veteran economic and financial observer, becomes Keating’s modern-day Boswell, reporting fascinating and frank conversations with the former prime minister both before and after his political demise.

Writing with great verve and insight, David Love explores the story of Paul Keating’s interrupted revolution — a story that has never been fully told — and sounds a timely warning that the failure to finish the job Keating started has left our new-found prosperity vulnerable, particularly in the current climate of international economic uncertainty. The Keating revolution, it turns out, is at least as relevant to the future as it has been to the past.

Don't Get Too Comfortable

David Rakoff takes us on a grand tour of the American culture of excess. Whether he is discussing the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde, working as a cabana boy at a South Beach hotel in Miami, or travelling to a private island off the coast of Belize to watch a soft-core video shoot — where he is provided with his very own personal manservant — rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly skewered.

Somewhere along the line, healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism; manic getting and spending have now become celebrated as moral virtues.

Both as a Wildean satire and as a plea for a little human decency, Don’t Get Too Comfortable reveals the extremes to which a devotion to consumer culture can lead.

The Lucy Family Alphabet

Judith Lucy has been cracking jokes about her parents for years. But when a birth relative's casual comment implied that she despised them, Judith was shocked. Sure, she had been talking about Ann and Tony Lucy like they were one-dimensional Irish nutbags who'd ruined her life for years, but there was always more to them and her own feelings than that.

So Judith decided it was time to write the full story of her parents and her childhood. And here it is, a reference book on all things Lucy from:

A is for Adoption (she is) to C is for Cleaning (they didn't) and for Counselling (you'll find out why she had a lot of it) to D is for Diets (she was put on one at eight) to H is for Heart Attack (her father's) to M is for Make Up (her father's) to N is for Nuts (there was a falling out over testicles) to R is for Review (to do with Nuts) to T is for Tanscendental Meditation (it didn't work) to X is for Xmas (when a lot of this started) and beyond...

In amongst the gags Judith explores the people her parents were and the impact of finding out - at twenty-five - that she was adopted. We meet Judith's birth mother by learn that ultimately it was her very unusual parents who made her who she is today.

The Lucy Family Alphabet is funny and ruthlessly honest, but also a moving tribute to the lunatics who raised one of Australia's best-known comedians.

The Spare Room

An extraordinary work of fiction from one of Australia's best-selling and most admired writers

Helen prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola, who is flying down from Sydney for a three-week visit. But this is no ordinary visit - Nicola has advanced cancer. She is coming to Melbourne to receive treatment she believes will cure her. From the moment Nicola steps off the plane, Helen becomes her nurse, her protector, her guardian angel and her stony judge.

The Spare Room tells a story of compassion and rage as the two women - one sceptical, one stubbornly serene - negotiate their way through Nicola's gruelling treatments. Garner's dialogue is pitch perfect, her sense of pacing flawless as this novel draws to its terrible and transcendent finale.

On Ecstasy

In this vivid, biographical piece, provocative director Barrie Kosky explores the feelings of intense joy and delight, as well as the power and terror, that is ecstasy.

MUP's new series Little Books on Big Themes pairs leading Australian thinkers and cultural figures with some of the big themes in life: rage, experience, longing and ecstasy. Each author's 10,000-word take on a chosen theme is presented as an eminently collectable hardback.

On Experience

In this beautifully written, eloquent piece, David Malouf explores the connections between writing and the imagination and offers wonderful insights into his own experiences of the writer's life.

On Rage

Germaine Greer's passionate and powerfully worded essay about Aboriginal rage is a provocation that will cause heated and intense debate.

On Longing

Blanche d'Alpuget's intimate and revealing meditation on longing examines the creative tension between writing and love. This moving tribute to her muse will surprise and touch readers.

Running With Scissors

In this unforgettable, and by turns hilarious and harrowing memoir, Augusten Burroughs recounts the bizarre events of his childhood. After his parents' divorce, his mother, a delusional poet, left him in the care of her psychiatrist, a man who might have benefited from a little therapy himself. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian mansion with the doctor's bizarre family and a few patients. In the psychiatrist's house, there are no rules, only chaos. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, Valium was eaten like Pez and, if things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock-therapy machine under the stairs... RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is a true story, compelling and maniacally funny. Above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.