Michelle de Kretser
Noted
'The Hanging Garden' by Patrick White
Michelle de Kretser
The publication of an unfinished draft is the writer’s version of that nightmare in which you find yourself naked in the street. Writers...
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Noted
'Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend of the World’s Most Famous Dog' by Susan Orlean
Michelle de Kretser
In World War I, trained ‘mercy dogs’ roamed among the wounded on the battlefields of France. A soldier could call one over and hold it for...
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Noted
'Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial' By Janet Malcolm
Michelle de Kretser
Courtrooms, like theatres, draw on claustrophobia to compel. The closed-door atmosphere, sealed off from the quotidian, lends contrived...
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Noted
'Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory' By Patrick Wilcken
Michelle de Kretser
In 1938 an obscure French anthropologist, sporting a topee and with a monkey clinging to his boot, led an expedition into deepest Brazil....
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Noted
'The Man Who Loved Children' by Christina Stead
Michelle de Kretser
It is one of the great ironies of our literature that Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, a novel steeped in autobiography,...
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Noted
'The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis' by Lydia Davis
Michelle de Kretser
In the United States, Lydia Davis has long been acclaimed for her experiments in short fiction. Elsewhere, she is best known as a...
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Noted
'Freedom' by Jonathan Franzen
Michelle de Kretser
Artists in fiction are coded confessions. Freedom gives us Richard Katz, rock musician and homme fatal, pitched suddenly, just like...
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'Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Fueds' by Lyndall Gordon
Michelle de Kretser
Central to Lyndall Gordon’s biography of Henry James is an extraordinary scene. As daylight fades over Venice, James drops a dead woman’s...
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'Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry' by Leanne Shapton
Michelle de Kretser
In Thomas Hardy’s elegiac poem ‘During Wind and Rain’ there are “Clocks and carpets and chairs / On the lawn all day”. As any trawler of...
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‘The Anthologist’ by Nicholson Baker
Michelle de Kretser
“Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I’m going to tell you everything I know.” That’s a good opening sentence: it’s colloquial and grabby, in...
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