Will Heyward
Will Heyward is a bookseller who works for Readings in Carlton and St Kilda. His writing as been published in The Weekend Australian, the Australian Book Review, and on the website of BOMB Magazine. He is a contributing editor of Higher Arc.
Reviews
A Man In Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard
In 1908, Romain Rolland, the French author who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915, coined the term roman-fleuve – literally, ‘river-novel’ – in order to describe his own ten volume work of fi…
Here and Now by Paul Auster & J.M. Coetzee
There’s a moment towards the end of Here and Now: Letters 2008 – 2011 when Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee complain about the misfortunes of being publically interviewed.
Coetzee on the Jaipur Literat…
Going Down Swinging No. 33
Disclaimer: I always forget how difficult I find reviewing literary journals, especially when the review in question is of a publication as well written and edited as Going Down Swinging No. 33. By t…
The Infatuations by Javier Marias
Even if your idea of a good time isn’t reading an emotionally complex and intellectually subtle novel that takes the tragic powers of love as its subject, and that nearly hums with latent erotic ener…
Woes Of The True Policeman by Roberto Bolano
I have little credibility as a reviewer of Roberto Bolaño. Ever since approximately page 200 of The Savage Detectives (the first of his books that I read), I’ve been under his spell. And the immeasur…
Las Vegas for Vegans by A.S. Patrić
I happen to know that A.S. Patrić is a fanatic of the short story. I have this crazy suspicion that he’s one of the most obsessive short-story writers on earth. I’m deadly serious. He reads maniacall…
Quarterly Essay 47: Political Animal by David Marr
Read our Q&A with David Marr here.
Picture Tony Abbott posing for one of those ceremonial G20 Summit class photos. Second from the back row, his skin-and-bone face – the face of a man well exercised…
The Memory of Salt by Alice Melike Ülgezer
The Memory of Salt, by Alice Melike Ülgezer, is a rare work of fiction that engages with multiculturalism not just as an idea or principle, but as a total and inescapable experience of life.
One hal…
The Method by Juli Zeh
The Method is a dystopian novel set during the middle of the 21st century that knows all the rules of the genre and deliberately manipulates them to wonderful effect. It’s a conceptual story that emp…
A History of Books by Gerald Murnane
On the eighth page of Barley Patch – a work of fiction by Gerald Murnane, published in 2009, the first such work to appear since Murnane decided that he was finished writing novels over a decade earl…
The Server by Tim Parks
A confession of favouritism: I love Tim Parks’ essays and book reviews. He’s an original journalist and a master of short form nonfiction. Nevertheless, I hadn’t read any of his novels before The Ser…
News
What I Loved: A Death In The Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Depending on the continent on which you purchase your reading material, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s most recently published work will either be available as a novel entitled A Death in the Family (Australia and UK) or a biography entitled My Struggle: Volume 1 (US). This, I think, is unusual.
Granted, very often, for marketing purposes, books are assigned different titles in different countries on th…
Q&A with David Marr, author of Quarterly Essay 47: Political Animal
David Marr chats with Will Heyward about Quarterly Essay 47: Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott.
Your essay characterises a young Tony Abbott as enthralled by an ideology that, ‘deplored the pill, homosexuality, rampant materialism, married women in the workforce, environmentalists, drugs [and] abortion…’ ‘The question,’ you ask, ‘is how much has he jettisoned since?’ What’s the sh…
Q&A with Alice Melike Ülgezer, author of The Memory of Salt
Alice Melike Ülgezer chats with Will Heyward about her novel, The Memory of Salt.
The Memory of Salt tells the story of Ali, the daughter of a Turkish circus musician and a young doctor from Melbourne, and of her parents’ romance. Writers often mine their own lives for first novels – how personal is this story and how much of you went into the character of Ali?
One thing I must say first of…