Arts & Letters: Noted
WORLD
'The Chemistry of Tears' By Peter Carey
Jennifer Byrne
In the peaty depths of Germany’s Black Forest, nineteenth-century English gentleman Henry Brandling commissions a giant clockwork automaton...
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CULTURE
'Outland' by Kevin Carlin
Benjamin Law
On paper, the premise of the new ABC1 sitcom Outland seems too self-consciously quirky for its own good. Homosexuals and sci-fi nerds?...
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SOCIETY
'The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia' By Bill Gammage
James Boyce
Modern environmental sensibility has not increased the number of Australians who are able to imagine what our dominant homelands – the...
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CULTURE
'Foal’s Bread' By Gillian Mears
Carmen Callil
Gillian Mears’s new novel tells the story of the Nancarrow family of One Tree Farm, subsistence farmers in rural New South Wales. Its...
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WORLD
'Caleb’s Crossing' By Geraldine Brooks
Kirsten Tranter
Caleb’s Crossing extends Geraldine Brooks’s interest in the early history of the United States, first explored in her Pulitzer Prize–...
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Japan
'1Q84' Books 1, 2 and 3 By Haruki Murakami
Lian Hearn
Leos Janacek’s Sinfonietta and Anton Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island both became bestsellers last year in Japan after featuring in Haruki...
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CULTURE
'What the Family Needed' By Steven Amsterdam
Cate Kennedy
Steven Amsterdam’s award-winning 2009 debut, Things We Didn’t See Coming, heralded the arrival of a richly comic, original and utterly...
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CULTURE
What’s in a Face? Aspects of Portrait Photography: Art Gallery of NSW - 24 September 2011 to 5 February 2012
Sebastian Smee
What can you read into a photograph of a face? Hurt. Happiness. Confidence. Contempt. There’s no limit. Indeed, if you’re anything like me...
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CULTURE
'Autumn Laing' By Alex Miller
Janine Burke
The Heide mythos, which has grown from the circle that gathered around arts patrons Sunday and John Reed at their home in Victoria’s Yarra...
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CULTURE
'The Street Sweeper' By Elliot Perlman
Kirsten Tranter
Elliot Perlman’s new novel, set in New York, traces the unlikely lines of connection between a set of characters from a broad social and...
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CULTURE
'Her Father’s Daughter' By Alice Pung
Brenda Walker
Alice Pung’s first book, Unpolished Gem (2006), was the work of a young, amusing and astute writer. While Her Father’s Daughter again makes...
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CULTURE
'Sarah Thornhill' By Kate Grenville
Delia Falconer
Each of the three books in Kate Grenville’s loose trilogy – The Secret River (2005), The Lieutenant (2008) and now Sarah Thornhill – is an...
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WORLD
'Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia’s Future' By Paul Cleary
Saul Eslake
For commodity-exporting nations such as Australia, the urbanisation and industrialisation of China and India present a once-in-human-...
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WORLD
'Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now' Art Gallery of South Australia
Terry Smith
Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now is another instalment in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s effort to re-badge itself as a...
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SOCIETY
'Nagasaki: The Massacre of the Innocent and Unknowing' By Craig Collie
Lian Hearn
Nagasaki stands at the head of a deep-water harbour on the western coast of Kyushu. It was where foreign traders came to Japan, each...
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WORLD
'The Hall of Uselessness' By Simon Leys
Linda Jaivin
The Hall of Uselessness, a compendium of Simon Leys’s cultural and political commentary, is an elegant mansion of many rooms, connected by...
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
'The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution' By Francis Fukuyama
Tim Soutphommasane
Most scholars have in them at best one major work. Had Francis Fukuyama ceased writing after The End of History and the Last Man, his...
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CULTURE
'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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CULTURE
'Mrs Carey’s Concert' by Bob Connolly and Sophie Raymond
Anna Goldsworthy
Mrs Carey’s Concert, a new documentary by Bob Connolly (of Rats in the Ranks and Facing the Music) and Sophie Raymond, offers a familiar...
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CULTURE
'Cloudstreet' By Matthew Saville
MJ Hyland
Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet is a compassionate masterpiece, which is to Australians what George Orwell’s 1984 is to the English and Harper Lee...
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The Shortlist Daily
7 February 2012
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