Joanna Di Mattia
Joanna Di Mattia is from Readings Carlton
Review — 28 Jul 2022
Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City by Melbourne International Film Festival
Cities are central to the history of cinema. New York. Paris. London. Hong Kong. All cities with an identifiable, iconic visual language. Cities are both setting and subject. It’s not…
Review — 3 Apr 2022
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Mira and her father live in the first draft of existence: a world like our own, but where people have evolved from either birds, bears or fish. Mira is the…
Review — 2 Mar 2022
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
Julie Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, opens in a strange but spellbinding way, with a cultural anthropology of a California swimming pool and the people who regularly swim in…
Review — 27 Jan 2022
Free Love by Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley’s fine new novel opens on a late summer evening in comfortable suburban London. It’s 1967. Phyllis Fischer, 40, lives with husband Roger, who fought in World War II…
Review — 6 Sep 2020
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald
I adored H is For Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s memoir of grief and falconry, which took an unconventional approach to the wellworn idea that the natural world has healing power…
Review — 3 Oct 2021
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Scour the formal historical record and you won’t find much about the woman known as Marie de France beyond information that she lived in the 12th century and wrote a…
Review — 6 Sep 2021
The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir & Lauren Elkin
In 1954, five years after she published The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir wrote a short novel. Beauvoir believed the unnamed work wasn’t serious enough to publish in her…
Review — 20 May 2021
Real Estate by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy sits at the top of my list of brilliant women I’d like to have a few drinks with. I imagine we’d sit in a smart London bar, martinis…
Review — 26 Apr 2021
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy challenged my understanding of the novel. It is so unlike what I expect from plot or character, that I now no longer read contemporary fiction the…
Review — 2 Feb 2021
We Are Who We Are
Luca Guadagnino is a master at depicting big feelings. In his most celebrated films, I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015), and Call Me by Your Name (2017), he…