Feature

Mark's Say: April, 2022

by Mark Rubbo

Pre-Covid, publishers would occasionally take booksellers out for drinks or dinner with one of their authors. Several years ago, Text Publishing had a function for Helen Garner. Sean O’Beirne, who also works as a bookseller, attended and was placed next to Helen. The two hit it off ; Sean, Helen and another writer began to meet regularly to talk about all sorts of things. Helen would read Sean’s work, really read it, and when Sean’s first collection of short fiction…

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An extract from The Future Is Fungi

The Future Is Fungi explores the mighty mycelial reach of fungi across four key areas: food, medicine, psychedelics and the environment. With mushroom profiles, informative texts on foraging and glorious 3D art, it’s a fascinating introduction to this hidden kingdom.

Nothing alive exists in isolation. To be alive means to be part of an intricate, sprawling web of cause and effect. Our lives are interwoven with that of plants, animals, bacteria and fungi, forming the beating heart of the planet…

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Authors share their favourite fictional visions of Australia

After Australia is a vital anthology that presents 12 visions of Australia’s future from 12 exciting First Nations writers and writers of colour. We asked some of the book’s contributors to share their picks for Australian spec fic readers, and also reflect on their own favourites fictional visions of Australia.

What are some of the most memorable visions of Australia you’ve discovered in fiction books?

Tomorrow, When the War Began was a big one growing up, in no small…

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Grandmothers' Law Should Never Be Broken

by Ali Cobby Eckermann

This is an edited extract from Ali Cobby Eckermann’s essay of the same title in Grandmothers: Essays by 21st-Century Grandmothers edited by Helen Elliott.

In the night someone strung a line of crow carcasses across the fence outside her house. She discovers them as she leaves the house for work. Her breath catches in her chest and she cannot breathe. Jesus! she mutters, half in anger and half in a plea to the heavens. Who would do such a thing?

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Readings staff share their MIFF 2019 top picks

This year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) program is jam-packed. Stuck on what to see? Our staff share their most-anticipated films below. Pro tip: It looks like lots of people are keen to see Jim Jarmusch’s new flick, so book it while tickets last!

Joanna Di Mattia recommends foreign films and a healthy dose of romance

I’ve been a regular at MIFF for over 20 years and sitting down with the program guide – even though, as a member…

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Q&A with Clare Strahan

by

Clare Strahan is one of six authors shortlisted for the 2019 Readings Young Adult Book Prize for her coming-of-age novel, The Learning Curves of Vanessa Partridge. In this interview, she shares details of her writing process and the origins of her funny, warm novel about love, sex, friendship, family, and finding your voice.

Congratulations on writing this amazing YA novel! Can you tell us a bit about what inspired you to write The Learning Curves of Vanessa Partridge?

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Dear Reader, May 2019

by Alison Huber

One of the perennial delights of working with new books is that there are always more new books (though it’s also a constant anxiety, since there are far too many to read, even in a thousand lifetimes), and we’re always furnished with advance copies well ahead of their release to the general public. As a consequence, I’m often reading something that won’t be available for several months when I write this column; by the time I sit down to round…

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On the magic of a Hot Desk Fellowship

by Jem Tyley-Miller

Supported by The Readings Foundation, the Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowships offer emerging writers the opportunity to pursue their writing at a dedicated desk at the Wheeler Centre for ten weeks, supported by a $1,000 stipend for each writer.

Following the announcement of this year’s successful participants, 2018 recipient Jem Tyley-Miller reflects on what she gained from her experience last year.

When applications for the 2018 Readings/Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowships opened last year, I had just closed another…

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Q&A with Readings Children’s Book Prize winner Carly Nugent

We sat down with the Carly Nugent – author of the 2019 Readings Children’s Book Prize winner The Peacock Detectives – to talk about what makes a good mystery, what inspired her book and what she’s been reading.

Congratulations on winning the Readings Children’s Book Prize! Can you tell us a bit about why you wanted to write this story? Has the book been with you for a while?

Thank you! It’s such an honour to win this prize. I…

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Read an extract from Raising Readers by Megan Daley

by Megan Daley

Award-winning teacher librarian Megan Daley’s Raising Readers: How to Nurture a Child’s Love of Books is an essential guide for any parent or educator who wants to help the children in their lives fall in love with books.

You can read an edited extract from the book below.

CHAPTER TWO: READING AND SCHOOL – WHEN IT ALL COMES TOGETHER

The mechanics of reading – where to begin?

If I have noticed one thing from watching my children learn to read…

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Read an extract from Growing Up African in Australia

by Sara El Sayed

Compiled by award-winning author Maxine Beneba Clarke, with curatorial assistance from writers Ahmed Yussuf and Magan Magan, Growing Up African in Australia is a compelling and evocative new anthology that brings together the diverse personal stories of more than 30 Australians of the African diaspora. ‘African Mama’ by Sara El Sayed is one such memorable story.

‘We always want what we don’t have,’ my mother said, on our first visit to African Mama. Straight hair being what we both didn’t…

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Read an extract from The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

by Sigrid Nunez

American author Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend is a moving meditation on friendship, loss, literature and memory, which revolves around the magical bond that develops between a grieving writer and her Great Dane. The book won the 2018 National Book Award for fiction, and is now available in a paperback format.

This is an edited extract from the book.

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could…

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Read an extract from Trace by Rachael Brown

by Rachael Brown

Trace: Who Killed Maria James? is ABC broadcast journalist Rachael Brown’s gripping account of her investigation into a 38-year-old cold case, which became the Walkley and Quill Award-winning podcast, Trace, and led to the re-opening of the case. This is an edited extract from the book.

April 2016

1.00pm Coroners Court w Ron
Diary note, 21 April 2016

I wince at Maria’s bruised face in the autopsy photos. Her left eye is slightly opened; the right, swollen and…

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Read an extract from The Year Everything Changed

In this edited extract from the preface of The Year Everything Changed: 2001, author Phillipa McGuinness asks whether everything really did change after 2001?

On New Year’s Eve, 31 December 2001, we buried our son. His name was Daniel. My husband Adam, his father and my sister stood alongside me in Singapore’s Chua Chu Kang Lawn Cemetery and we watched a small, white coffin go into the ground. A nervous priest said words that may as well have been…

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A spotlight on a brilliant new Australian crime novel

by Jock Serong

Mark Brandi’s debut novel is more than atmospheric: this is visceral Australian noir. Jock Serong introduces us to the next big thing in Australian crime fiction.

Brandi is a writer who pays close attention to the physical; to the shapes and smells and sensations of the human body, set in vivid contrast to the torpor of a dead-end town. Wimmera is the story of two best friends, Ben and Fab, growing up in north-west Victoria in the late eighties. Alongside…

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Australian YA: the quiet achiever

by Emily Gale

Professionally, you’d have to be a little short of Earth logic to give your heart away to young adult (YA) fiction in this country. The challenges come from all sides.

You’re up against industry snobbery, for a start, despite the fact that children’ and YA books as a category is that rare beast: a print publishing and bookselling growth area. Martin Amis skimmed us a casual slur in 2011, summing up many people’s inside-thoughts: ‘If I had a serious…

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Thoughts on Go Set A Watchman

by Nina Kenwood

I’ve finished reading Go Set A Watchman.

Whew! What a relief! Now I can read all those reviews, opinion pieces, hot takes and tweets safe in the knowledge that I have read the book, and my opinion, should I choose to comment on an article (I won’t) is somewhat qualified. If anyone ever says to me, ‘Well have you actually read the book?’, I can say, ‘Yes, I read it within a day of release,’ and then I can…

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Rebecca Starford on writing Bad Behaviour

by Rebecca Starford

I studied creative writing at university. I loved almost everything about the course: the teachers were inspiring, the readings insightful and provocative, and the workshops were a safe and temperate space.

But the exercises I hated the most – which left me sitting under the fluorescent lights, mouth agape, my mind utterly blank – were on memoir.

‘Write about your childhood,’ our tutor instructed. ‘Write about your first memory. Your worst memory. Your best memory.’

As I sat there, glumly…

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On stories of motherhood

by Emily Harms and Chris Gordon

Emily Harms and Chris Gordon discuss two new anthologies, Mothers & Others and Mothermorphosis, featuring women writing about their experiences of being – and not being – a mother.

Chris: Reading two books about women’s experiences of motherhood back-to-back was quite engulfing. I found myself reflecting on my kids’ birth stories quite a lot. Essentially the stories and experiences, even the short fiction included among the essays in Mothers & Others, were about the inner thoughts of women…

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Miriam Sved on Janette Turner Hospital

by Miriam Sved

I am teaching a creative writing subject this semester about short fiction. I’ve tutored in this subject a few times over the years, and I love it. Lots of grist in the reader: Chekhov, Faulkner, Garner, Munro. I can keep coming back to these stories and finding new ways into them. And short fiction is good to teach: literary techniques jump right out at you, there’s nowhere for them to hide. In novels you tend to have to search for…

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Rebecca Harkins-Cross on Hilton Als

by Rebecca Harkins-Cross

‘I come from the Stanislavski school of writing,’ said Hilton Als, delivering a keynote on ‘The Role of the Critic’ in 2010. ‘You become the subject.’

A theatre critic for the New Yorker since 2002, it’s no surprise that performance metaphors abound in Als’s essays too. But the notion of the non-fiction writer embodying their subject as an actor would is radical, profoundly shifting the way we define the designation. Isn’t acting always a fiction? Stanislavski’s revolutionary approach taught performers…

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James Butler on Jeanette Winterson

by James Butler

I’ve been thinking a lot about the body lately, about consciousness and embodiment and the ways we relate to them. The mind and body are often distinguished from each other, drawn as two parts of a whole: the mind an essence and the body a vessel. I’ve been questioning why we maintain such a distinction, what the repercussions of that distinction are, and what writing and actively thinking about the body can do.

These questions are how I came to…

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Samuel Rutter on Michel Houllebecq as himself

by Samuel Rutter

The appearance of writers on the silver screen is nothing new – think of William S Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy or Maya Angelou who both wrote Janet Jackson’s poetic lines and played a minor character in John Singleton’s 1993 ‘hit’ Poetic Justice. At best these writers appear as a more or less romanticised version of themselves, with a few zinging one-liners, and at worst they have a non-speaking cameo in the film adaptation of their bestselling novel.

Screening at…

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Oliver Driscoll on beauty and menace in Janet Frame's work

by Oliver Driscoll

No doubt like many people, when I first watched Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel at My Table, some ten years ago, I intended to read Janet Frame’s three-part autobiography – To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table and The Envoy from Mirror City – on which the film is based, and anything else of hers I could get my hands on.

The books cover, respectively, Frame’s childhood and teenage years; then her twenties, much of which…

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Luke Ryan on the worthiness of comic writing

by Luke Ryan

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I grew up in a gilded age for printed comedy. Guided by the book-buying whims of my older brother, mine was a pre-adolescence of Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side comics, the venerated output of Bill Watterson and Gary Larson respectively. Watterson and Larson were two artists who succeeded not only in wholly defining their chosen mediums, but who also took an arcing philosophical perspective on the practice and purpose of comedy…

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Sam Cooney on Kurt Vonnegut's sense of humour

by Sam Cooney

In primary school, I learned pretty quickly that there were two ways to find yourself lying on the playground concrete, holding your stomach and gasping for air. A fist or a knee from an older or bigger kid straight into the guts: that’d do it every time. The other way was by laughing so much I couldn’t possibly stay vertical. Many of my school years were punctuated by equal parts roughhousing and cacking myself, but it is the latter that…

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Anna Heyward on Karl Ove Knausgaard and Lydia Davis

by Anna Heyward

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard reminds us, in the style of Proust, that the only subject needed for a life’s work is a life itself. Though so far just half of his six-volume My Struggle cycle has appeared in English (Knausgaard’s translator, Don Bartlett, can’t work fast enough for most of his Anglophone readers), the stretch and the intensity of his project is already clear; reading volumes one and two feels a bit like standing on the cliff’s edge and…

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Eleanor Limprecht on listening to Gillian Welch

by Eleanor Limprecht

I grew up mocking my father’s penchant for country and bluegrass music. Why would anyone choose to listen to twangy voices singing of honkytonk angels and men done and gone? What was with the screeching fiddles, noodling guitars and high lonesome mandolins? I preferred the smooth pop melodies of Paula Abdul or the self-indulgent rage of the Beastie Boys.

Still, I listened closely on car rides, if purely for the purpose of making fun. Dolly Parton was a favourite, though…

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Adam Curley on the essays of Gay Talese

by Adam Curley

In a 2009 interview with the Paris Review, American non-fiction writer Gay Talese described his unorthodox approach to reporting for the New York Times as a young man in the 1950s and 60s: ‘I knew I did not want to be on the front page,’ he said. ‘On the front page you’re stuck with the news. The news dominates you. I wanted to dominate the story.’

It was Talese’s approach to non-fiction that had Tom Wolfe announce him a…

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Laura Jean McKay on Lorrie Moore's Birds of America

by Laura Jean McKay

Reading Lorrie Moore for the second time is a different experience to reading her for the first. Not just because of that extra skin of insight, though there’s that. Once you know Moore, you also know that she’s very likely to wreak havoc on the lives of her characters: a woman who is holding a baby one minute will fall off a picnic bench and kill it the next; a ghost in a roof will turn out to be an…

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Ali Alizadeh on modern representations of Joan of Arc

by Ali Alizadeh

I have spent quite a number of years reading about the enigmatic, engrossing historical figure of Joan of Arc, the young European peasant who ran away from home, became a knight, led the armies of the King of France against his enemies, and was burnt as a heretic in the early fifteenth century. Most historical accounts of the medieval woman’s life and persona are attempts at a purely factual representation of her story, or attempts at telling her story, as…

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Sam Twyford-Moore on photography books

by Sam Twyford-Moore

Good writing about photography is hard to find. There are millions of photography books – instructions, owner manuals, individual artist monographs, digital camera guides for dummies – but few books of critical writing dedicated to the art. Usually it takes a non-expert stepping into the field to offer a different perspective and bring the book to attention. Janet Malcolm began writing about photography for The New Yorker in the late 1970s, seemingly building on the work of Susan Sontag’s seminal…

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Jo Case on Misjudging True Crime

by Jo Case

In 2009, I interviewed Chloe Hooper about The Tall Man, her now world-renowned book on an Aboriginal death in custody on Palm Island, and the longstanding community tensions it brought to a boil. At the time, I was surprised to hear her categorise her book as true crime, citing her influences as Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I had always considered those books reportage, and had always been a bit sniffy about…

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Why my literary journal exists

by Bronte Coates

Recently, Robyn Annear wrote an article for The Monthly which queried the purpose of Australian literary journals. In her opening remark she asked whether these publications were the hallmarks of a thriving scene or playgrounds for emerging writers. Later, she commented: ‘Depending wholly on sales and subscriptions would seem to be no way for a literary magazine to thrive.’

Such a statement brings to mind Matthew Lamb’s (editor of Island magazine) excellent and thought-provoking interview with the Wheeler Centre

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Ellena Savage on reading other people’s diaries

by Ellena Savage

The main problem with feelings is that nobody wants to hear about yours. Except for me. And maybe the other literary voyeurs, whose preference is to read about your raw and pained inner life, but only if this pain of yours is elegantly expressed. For me, the best of these stylised confessions are contained in the notebooks of three great modern writers: the diaries of Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and Susan Sontag (1933–2004), and the essays of Joan Didion (b.1934).

Plath…

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Alice Gage on filmmaker Jeff Nichols

by Alice Gage

‘Is anyone seeing this?’ asks Curtis (Michael Shannon) in Jeff Nichols’ second film, Take Shelter (2011). Curtis has pulled his car over to the side of the road to watch a dry lightning storm approaching ominously from the fields beyond. His wife and daughter are asleep in the back seat and, indeed, no one sees it but him. Curtis’s portentous visions are leaking from his dreams into his days. Is he going crazy, or is he the lone receiver of…

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Maria Takolander on Diego Marani

by Maria Takolander

Loneliness, by definition an intimate condition, strikes me as being intimately associated with literature. Perhaps this has something to do with the solitary act of reading: a reader communing with a book is undergoing a profoundly individual and private experience.

Or perhaps it’s because of the literary representations of loneliness that have been seared into my consciousness. There’s the obscene figure of Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, enduring his alienation alone in his room, or the orphan…

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A Cook, A Caravan, A Canoe

by SJ Finn

SJ Finn on the real and mythical, the bizarre and banal in Wayne Macauley’s writing.

I buy Australian literary magazines as often as I can. This is because I love reading them. And because there is that small issue of those magazines needing all the monetary support they can get: a testimony, perhaps, to the difficulty of knowing what true value is in a modern world.

Over and above general pleasure, there are occasions when my appreciation soars. The publication…

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Getting back up on the horse

by Samuel Rutter

Samuel Rutter writes on the life, work and fatalistic Southern failings of William Faulkner.

James Franco in film adaptation of *As I Lay Dying

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Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner William Faulkner has been portrayed in popular culture as something of a boozy, tortured genius (think the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink, for one). We can expect to see less of the man and more of his work on screen in the near future, with HBO purchasing the television rights…

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Growing up with Jane Eyre

by Michelle Law

Michelle Law recalls her first reading addiction, escaping into

Back in the early thousands, Christopher Lee was interviewed about his role as Saruman in the Lord of the Rings films. ‘How did you prepare?’ asked the journalist. Lee replied that he did little preparation. He was already familiar with the character from re-reading the trilogy every year. I allowed Lee’s response to sink in. Wouldn’t you get bored of reading the same books? What could you gain from those readings…

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Jawbreakers For Your Eyes

by Ronnie Scott

Ronnie Scott tells us why art comics are the true radicals of the graphic novels world, from Paper Rad to

It’s been a long time since the 80s and getting longer every day, but looking at headlines about comic books you wouldn’t really know it.

It all started with three books that changed the game forever: two apocalyptic reimaginings of the superhero origins-story, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and Art Spiegelman’s…

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Picturing Gatsby

by Nicki Greenberg

Nicki Greenberg looks back at adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 screenplay to

I first read The Great Gatsby when I was 17 years old. I was captivated by it: by the beauty, the melancholy, the grand yearnings and grown-up extravagance that hummed on a frequency outside the range of my experience. I had to stretch to touch that floating, tarnished world, and just as my fingertips grazed its edges, it would elude me again…

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On Motherhood and Sharing Books

In the lead-up to Mother’s Day, three Melbourne authors reflect on the books they’ve most enjoyed sharing with their mothers – and the reads they’ve loved sharing with their children, too.

Jo Case

My favourite author to share with my mum is Jane Austen, the first ‘grown up’ author I really loved. When I was in high school, Mum repeatedly urged me to read Pride and Prejudice and Emma – but I refused, just because I was in the stage…

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Let's Talk Carver

by Mick McCoy

Mick McCoy takes a look at the various renditions of Raymond Carver’s short story, ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’, from Paul Kelly’s songs to Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne.

At the South by Southwest music and film conference in Austin, Texas, in March this year, writer Larry Ratso Sloman attempted to flatter Nick Cave by telling him that, for a drug addict, he was more productive than William S. Burroughs. ‘I dunno, really. I don’t know his stuff. Is it…

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The Woman in Black

by Helen Trinca

Helen Trinca revisits Madeleine St John’s unsettled domesticity in

I am often asked which of Madeleine St John’s novels is ‘the best’ to begin with. Which one wouldI recommend to a reader unfamiliar with her work? As her biographer, I confess that I can’t get enough of this underrated writer. Indeed, one of my minor sorrows in life is that there are only four novels – and a fifth unpublished draft I have been lucky enough to read. How…

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Age will not weary him

by Krissy Kneen

Krissy Kneen on age and desire in the work of James Salter.

I am very fond of listening to The New Yorker fiction podcast. The monthly audio recording features a writer reading another writer’s short story, and then discussing it with the magazine’s fiction editor. When I first discovered the podcast, I was treated to one such reading.

It seemed simple and straightforward: a terminally ill woman goes out to dinner with her husband. Quietly, and without unnecessary flourishes…

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Groupie Girl

by Simmone Howell

Simmone Howell writes on her failed attempt at groupiedom and her beloved collection of band-date paperbacks.

‘Research psychologists say that girls from the ages of 11-14 reach a lifetime high energy peak. Their appetite is insatiable. They never again care about things as much as they do during this period, and minutiae don’t exist for them.’

– Groupies & Other Girls by John Burks and Jerry Hopkins

One summer’s day when I was 13, I dressed in purple baggy pants…

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The lies we tell, you and I

by Chris Somerville

Chris Somerville writes on the anxieties of literary taste, and the lies we tell to cover them.

When I was around nineteen or in my early twenties, I went into a second hand bookstore near my house. Where I live, on the Gold Coast, is not the best place for bookstores, but there are a few great second hand ones scattered about. I was browsing through the fiction when I spotted a book that I really liked, but already owned…

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