Beowulf – the classical warrior-meets-monster tale – is one yarn to make the American soldier’s swag, bound for Baghdad. So too is The Odyssey – another travelogue with sword. And The Iliad, where the Trojan War of course is the major bloody episode.
Lieutenant Colonel Jason Armagost, who flew aboard USAF squadrons in 2003 during air […]
Julia Zemiro steals false fingernails. Charles Firth swallows longnecks in North Korea and waxes poetic about hedgehogs. Meantime Graeme Blundell drops F-bombs in notable kitchens, while crime comic Shane Maloney goes to Underbelly court.
A four-taste of the frolics lurking in The Best Australian Humorous Writing, due for release later this year – unlike those Underbelly […]
Smith Magazine began the mania. Or was it Ernest Hemingway?
Old Papa was challenged to write a short story in six words. His typewriter bashed out this beauty:
For Sale, baby shoes, never used.
Then Smith picked up the thread, the literary magazine daring readers to summarise their lives in six words only. What followed was a frenzy, […]
A classic, says Mark Twain, is a book people praise but don’t read.
War and Peace, say. Or Ulysses. Both tomes appear on a list of Most Unfinished Novels, a survey result from March last year. As do a few surprises.
In order of abandonment, according to feedback from 4000 failed British readers, the Least Concluded […]
Here’s a bookworm confessional I wrote for the Victorian Writers Centre last month. Surely I’m not alone in this perversion?!
We are what we read, or so I read somewhere. Not sure where. I’ll need to check my booklist. Because privately, persistently, I’ve kept a tally on every book I’ve read – from AA Milne to […]
Writers can’t just be writers nowadays, says author Robert Dessaix. They also need to be figure skaters.
Stage hounds. Hucksters. Acrobats. A presence in the limelight to help move so many units per festival. When Clive James wows his throng with fluent Auden quotes and a tango twirl beside the lectern, he’s bound to enter […]
Along comes Nikola Tesla, father of radio, forefather of robots and Mix Masters, and a cocktail of my own surname.
See, that was the plan. Reviewing a novel based on Tesla’s madcap life – The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt - I first toyed with the Tesla/Astle conceit.
Be fun, I thought. Slowly picking through […]
Before I begin, a few vows:
I don’t have shares in harvest magazine.
I’m not dating a harvest editor.
Style plays 2nd fiddle after content.
And I’m sober, despite the launch’s booze.
That covers most bases. Just in case a skeptic reader sniffs any strategy behind the forthcoming gush. My tally of conflicting interests? Nil.
Because harvest is a hoedown, a […]
A privileged part of my working week is reading and reviewing books for Radio National. Not that every title to lob in the letterbox is a must-read - some in fact may verge on clunker - but a recent one - My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru is a standout. And standouts, I discovered, can be […]
Sleepers Almanac No 4 is not your typical airport genre. But then again, it’s a damn fine collection to sneak onto your next red-eye flight, or even the 86 tram to Bundoora. And I’m not saying that because my kelpie cross called Abo is sitting (kinda obediently) amid its pages.
Jammed with two dozen stories, from […]