Joanna Di Mattia
Joanna Di Mattia is from Readings Carlton
Blog post — 25 Jul 2024
A beginner's guide to Irish fiction
For a small country, Ireland has produced a significant volume of literature with widespread cultural impact. It continues to do so, counting among its successes six Booker Prize winners and…
Review — 23 Jun 2024
Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker
I have a special place in my heart for group biographies, especially of women writers and artists working in the first half of the 20th century. Wonderful then to be…
Review — 19 May 2024
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin
Anna lives in an apartment in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris. It’s 2019. In her late 30s, she’s recently suffered a painful miscarriage and has deferred returning to work as…
Review — 26 Feb 2024
Practice by Rosalind Brown
Scholarly success demands a certain ascetic discipline and Annabel, the protagonist of Rosalind Brown’s exceptional debut novel, thinks she’s adopted all the right habits. She’s spending a cold Sunday at…
Blog post — 8 Dec 2023
Bookseller spotlight: Joanna Di Mattia’s favourite books of 2023
Joanna Di Mattia is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
I made an early declaration this year that Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos would be the best novel I’d read in 2023, and…
Review — 31 Jul 2023
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin
When I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I took a course in women’s art history that ran over multiple semesters and offered a historical survey. I encountered art…
Review — 31 Jul 2023
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck & Michael Hofmann (trans.)
The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fourth novel refers to a tenet of ancient Greek philosophy – the idea of the right or critical moment to act. Just how kairos impacts…
Review — 3 Jul 2023
George: A Magpie Memoir by Frieda Hughes
I’ll confess I wanted to review this memoir, in part, because of a prying curiosity. What might the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes reveal to me about her…
Review — 3 Jul 2023
Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life by Amy Key
What if being single isn’t a transient state? Is a life without romantic love necessarily intolerable? These are just two of the tough, weighty questions from which Amy Key’s introspective…
Review — 20 Apr 2023
August Blue by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy’s new novel unfolds like a dream – surreal, beguiling, enigmatic. As with most of Levy’s work, it creates a singular world, influenced by Duras and de Beauvoir and…
