Miles Allinson
Reviews
Forty-one False Starts by Janet Malcolm
In a lovely essay on J.D. Salinger in her new book, Janet Malcolm quotes a dismissively ironic review by Arthur Kazin. ‘Some day’, Kazin wrote, ‘there will be learned theses on The Use of the Ash Tra…
Blasphemy: New And Selected Stories by Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie is something of a big deal in American fiction. He’s published 20 books, directed films, and in 2010 he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Blasphemy is a big collection of his sto…
Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner, a talented American poet, has now written a novel about poetry, but don’t let that put you off. While Lerner’s poetry is often difficult, in a clever, self-defeating sort of way, his nove…
Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe
Josephine Rowe is a Melbourne writer who has been quietly accumulating adulation for some years now. In truth, Tarcutta Wake is her fourth collection of very short stories, although the first two wer…
News
What I Loved: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
At certain times a book is able to take hold of you in such a way as to direct the angle of your life for a while. W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn did this for me when I first discovered it a few years ago. I still think it’s the best work of fiction I’ve ever read.
Nominally the account of a long walk, which the narrator once took along the coast of East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn might be b…
Meet the Bookseller with Miles Allinson
Why do you work in books?
Basically, I’m unqualified to do much else. After studying for 25 years (or what feels like it), the only other thing I’m really qualified to do is throw leaves around and prank-call people. Als…
Unspeakable Acts, Fateful Nights: The Work of Roberto Bolaño
Miles Allinson from Readings St Kilda considers the lasting impact of Roberto Bolaño, and his most recently published work The Third Reich..
In the fiction of Roberto Bolaño there’s a character called Jim, a North American poet who, in two separate, slightly different stories, is standing on a street in Mexico watching a fire-eater:
‘People stopped to watch and then went on their way, exce…
