Steve Bidwell-Brown
Steve Bidwell-Brown is our Online Fulfilment Manager. He has previously worked as a literary events coordinator for novelists and poets, as a carnie in a travelling circus, and as a semi-professional cricketer in the UK. He likes being able to read and write.
Reviews
True Detective
As the clinical interrogator of civilisation’s ills, the detective trawls through the darkest and least accessible pockets of society in search of answers to the riddles that lay before them. What em…
Orfeo by Richard Powers
In 2004, American art professor Steve Kurtz was arrested when police discovered a laboratory in his house containing artworks made from genetically modified bacteria. Kurtz maintained that his works,…
Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia by David Hunt
Talented comedy writer David Hunt has created a remarkable work of pop history with Girt – a well-researched, engaging and articulate lampooning of Australia’s earliest colonial years.
Taking an ear…
Forgotten War by Henry Reynolds
There is a violence in Australia’s history that few are prepared to acknowledge, argues Henry Reynolds, for the country that venerates the Anzac also fails to recognise the Aboriginal Australians who…
Raised From The Ground by José Saramago
In Raised from the Ground, the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist José Saramago has taken small plots of Portuguese land and transformed them into densely woven microcosms, creating a fascinating mult…
Unstuck In Time by Gregory D. Sumner
Cult novels such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions made Kurt Vonnegut one of the most popular authors of the twentieth century. His peculiar blend of science fiction, sa…
The Burning Library by Geordie Williamson
Why does three-time Miles Franklin Award-winning author David Ireland currently have only one book in print?
Why is M. Bernard Eldershaw’s 1947 capitalism-mocking novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow more re…
News
What I Loved: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
It’s the early 1960s and life is aglow on the American east coast. Amateur musicians are composing Beatles-inspired pop music, local shrinks are starting to prescribe medicinal LSD, and words like ‘feminism’ are sprouting in the minds of the young. Somewhere in this budding psychedelic mix is Oedipa Maas, a 28-year-old homemaker who has just been informed that her millionaire ex-lover is dead and…
