Chris Dite
Chris Dite is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
Reviews
The Trials of Portnoy by Patrick Mullins
In 1969 Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint – a book so widely accepted now that it is deemed boring – was banned in Australia. Undercover police raided bookstores, charged booksellers and seized all t…
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series – a rollicking mishmash of Battle Royale and America’s Got Talent – sparked endless copycats. But the master herself has returned for this bloody, bold and resolu…
A Wunch of Bankers by Daniel Ziffer
You can thank the Trump administration for the rebirth and soaring popularity of the behind-the-scenes political hatchet job. From Bob Woodward’s artful Fear to Michael Wolff’s tawdry Fire and Fury, …
Superior: The return of race science by Angela Saini
Superior is science journalist Angela Saini’s exploration of the rise, slight fall and second coming of ‘race science’. It’s the perfect antidote to the whirlpool of pseudoscience currently engulfing…
Teacher by Gabbie Stroud
Education and teachers are political footballs like no other. Politicians regularly stir up controversy about teachers’ daily working lives: their (excessive) wages; their (generous) holidays; their …
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
In the near future Britain has become a place of complete and utter transparency. Every utterance is recorded. Parliament has been disbanded. But this is no hackneyed North Korea. Everyone sees, hear…
The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook by Michael Brooks
The philosopher Zeno, of Elia’s arrow paradox, is frustratingly simple. When an archer shoots an arrow we perceive it to move towards the target. But we understand that in its journey there, the arro…
NK3 by Michael Tolkin
Present-day Los Angeles already feels pretty post-apocalyptic. In NK3 Michael Tolkin takes the inequality, violence, misogyny and horror of contemporary Beverley Hills, Culver City and Skid Row and m…
Luna: Wolf Moon by Ian McDonald
Most reviews of Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon described it as: ‘_Game of Thrones_ meets Dallas on the moon’. They were all bang on the money.
A hundred or so years from now, mining operations on our…
Fargo
Inspired by the 1996 film, this adaptation of the Coen brothers’ fan favourite does its muse proud. A wolf named Lorne Malvo has come to rural Minnesota. The sweeping strings in the opening titles le…
Vogliamo Tutto (we want everything) by Nanni Balestrini
The student and worker movements of the late sixties in France and Italy are often not well understood these days. More often than not, they are depicted in contemporary film and literature as the ba…
Here Come the Dogs by Omar Musa
Omar Musa’s new verse novel swaggers charmingly onto the scene. It follows a group of crude, sometimes violent and partially talented young guys as they take drugs, get tattoos, pick up girls and wor…
Equilateral by Ken Kalfus
Ken Kalfus’ latest offering, very loosely based on Victorian scientific speculation, follows a nineteenth-century English astronomer’s attempt to build a giant equilateral triangle filled with petrol…
Griffith Review 41: Now We are Ten edited by Julianne Schultz
This tenth anniversary edition of the Griffith REVIEW steers clear of a self-congratulatory birthday and gets straight to the point: what does the future hold for Australia and the world? A cross-sec…
The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon
This series of autobiographical sketches set in both the former Yugoslavia and modern-day Chicago confounds expectations. Aleksandar Hemon’s fiction has bewildered reviewers. It lurches from wild his…
News
What I Loved: Because a White Man’ll Never Do it by Kevin Gilbert
Sometimes publishers make bold choices. The recent re-publication of Kevin Gilbert’s polemic from the 1970s, Because a White Man’ll Never Do It, is such a choice. Gilbert, a co-founder of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, wrote the book to spark debate and encourage political organisation in Aboriginal communities. That the work still stands as relevant today, and even as absolutely urgent…
