Also by Delia Falconer

March 2010

February 2010

December 2009 - January 2010

November 2009

October 2009

September 2009

August 2009

July 2009

June 2009

May 2009

April 2009

March 2009

February 2009

December 2008 - January 2009

November 2008

October 2008

see more covers

Back Issues

$9.95 inc. post

Navigation

Books | March 2008

Train I Ride

Don Watson’s ‘American Journeys’

Delia Falconer

EMAIL | PRINT | NEWSLETTER |

Facebook |

Twitter |

This content is only available in full online to paid subscribers of The Online Monthly. Please use the form at the top of this page to login.

To access this content immediately, subscribe to The Online Monthly here or get the print edition here.

Other items by this contributor are listed on the left (if available). Most essays from previous editions of The Monthly and selected pieces from the current edition are free online.or watch SlowTV, our free internet TV channel.

Recently forwarded | The Monthly

The Whirling Dervish

Tony Abbott

Louis Nowra

Howard’s Brutopia

The battle of ideas in Australian politics

Kevin Rudd

The Wild Frontier

The Child Gangs of Tweed Heads

Mandy Sayer

Ebony

The Girl in the Room

Anne Manne

The Global Financial Crisis

Kevin Rudd

Recently forwarded | SlowTV

Waleed Aly asks Christian Lander about Stuff White People Like

Historical Encounters

Arthur Calwell & Peter Kocan

In the lead-up to a federal election, the Labor Opposition leader is shot at point-blank range as he leaves a rowdy public meeting. The bullet, fired from a sawn-off rifle, shatters the window of his car, spattering him with broken glass and bullet fragments. His would-be assassin drops the gun and runs away. He is chased, caught and overpowered without further incident. A 19-year-old factory hand, he says he wants to be remembered by history for killing somebody important. He chose his target "because I don't like his politics".

The Opposition leader, in...

Monthly books

'The Legacy' by Kirsten Tranter

'The Pregnant Widow' by Martin Amis

Liberal Fundamentalist

AC Grayling's 'Liberty in the Age of Terror'

The Sins of the Son

Vladimir Nabokov's 'The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments'

Easy Rider

Frederick Seidel's 'Ooga-Booga and Poems: 1959-2009'

Monthly music

Obscured by Clouds

Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'

Waleed Aly

Curtain Call

Joan Sutherland

Peter Conrad

Prepared

The ANAM Piano Festival

Anna Goldsworthy

Setting Herself Apart

Sarah Blasko's 'As Day Follows Night'

Robert Forster

The Pretendies

The art of the spoken interlude

Paul Kelly

Monthly film

Lost Boys

Jacques Audiard's 'A Prophet' and John Hillcoat's 'The Road'

In A Prophet, a dazzling new film about innocence and power from Jacques Audiard (director of The Beat My Heart Skipped, 2005), 19-year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) is about to embark on a six-year prison sentence for assaulting a cop. Polite and deferential, Malik is hard to read at first. The little we glean about his life is framed in terms of negatives: he has no contacts, no relatives; he didn’t grow up with his parents, but in juvenile centres. If he’s experiencing fear as he enters the chaos of the prison at Brécourt, he doesn’t show it. He’...

Random reading

From the archive

Feral Howl

Arundhati Roy's "Listening to Grasshoppers"

Tim Soutphommasane