SOCIETY

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

The Sins of the Son

By Simon Leys

The bitterness of an interrupted life is nothing compared to the bitterness of an interrupted work: the probability of a continuation of the first beyond the grave seems infinite by comparison with the hopeless incompleteness of the second. There perhaps it will seem nonsense, but here all the same it remains unwritten.– Vladimir Nabokov, 1965, unpublished, unfinished Russian continuation&n

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

Easy Rider

By Kate Jennings

For your consideration: “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.” Now there’s a rip-snorting line of poetry if there ever was one. Frederick Seidel, who is not afraid to repeat himself, offers the line not once but three times in Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 112pp; $24). In my youth, loaded up with righteous moralism and my mind dead-bolted shut, I would’ve stopped r

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

Lost Boys

By Luke Davies

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 juveni

John Waters

Divine Intervention

By Peter Conrad

Australia’s girdling oceans used to serve as a prophylactic, our defence against the infectious depravity of the northern hemisphere. The Customs Act 1901 fiercely preserved our innocence; during my adolescence in the late 1960s I made an impatient inventory of the prohibited books and films I intended to catch up with as soon as I got overseas. Nowadays c

Margaret Court and Martina Navratilova

By Shane Maloney

When Margaret Court walked into the locker room at the close of the 1973 French Open, Martina Navratilova tried not to gawk. Court was a figure of awe, the most successful player in the history of women’s tennis. Navratilova was an ungainly teenager competin

The ‘Guinness World Records’

Broken Record

By Malcolm Knox

High noon. A red dust storm has swallowed Sydney, and Brittany Boffo and Dean Frenkel are sitting in a green room readying themselves to make human history. Both are already world-record holders. Brisbane’s Brittany, 11, can do more body skips – contortion

Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Eating Animals’

Cold Turkey

By Peter Singer

Jonathan Safran Foer is a talented novelist with a gift for writing amusingly about serious issues. In Everything Is Illuminated (2003), he created a Ukrainian narrator, Alex, who describes in hilarious detail his work assisting an American Jew – named Jonathan Safran

Robin Boyd’s ‘The Australian Ugliness’ Fifty Years On

Coming Of Age

By Peter Conrad

In 1960, when Robin Boyd published his attack on the stylistic cowardice of our suburbs, it took courage to call Australia ugly. The country has never bragged about its beauty, as America loudly does in the hymn that celebrates its azure skies and shining seas

John Keats and Fanny Brawne Revisited

Bright Stars

By Sophie Gee

John Keats’s last letter is just about his most powerful piece of writing. He was in Rome, dying of tuberculosis. He’d gone there in a final attempt to stave off the death he knew by then was inevitable. He was separated from his beloved fiancée and her family, who

Australian Film

Nowhere Near Hollywood

By Louis Nowra

I set out to watch most of the Australian films released this year because I wanted to grasp the condition of our industry. On a practical level, it was often hard to find these films; they seldom stayed in the cinema long enough. I became used to tracking the

Dead, Wrapped in Cardboard

By Benjamin Law

People might flock to the Gold Coast to feel alive, but it is increasingly also a destination for the dead. Drive inland, away from the scorching beaches, breakneck theme parks and thumping nightclubs, and you’ll eventually hit the quiet, bushy hinterland th

Anglican Business

Comment

By David Marr

Sydney’s brand new archbishop wanted money – lots and lots of money – to persuade 400,000 souls in the nation’s most sinful city “to serve Christ in love” within a decade. By chance – or malign good fortune, perhaps – Peter Jensen’s passion for growth

Joseph Kosuth and Conceptual Art

Neon Statements

By Justin Clemens

At the beginning of the 1960s, the New York art scene was going wild. World War II had created the conditions for the city to become the new capital of the world, and Americans were unapologetically seizing opportunity in every way they could. Not only had ‘Old Europe’ been physically devastated by the war, but its pretensions of moral and aesthetic supe

Allen & Unwin, 272pp; $39.99

'Lovesong' by Alex Miller

By Geordie Williamson

“In tragic life,” wrote George Meredith in Modern Love, a savage poetic account of the breakdown of his marriage, “No villain need be! Passions spin the plot.” Alex Miller’s eighth novel also tells the story of a marriage, in this instance between a young Australian and a Tunisian immigrant. And Miller, too, discovers dramatic tension in the old inconsonance of men’s and women’s desi

Fourth Estate, 400pp; $32.99

'Manhood for Amateurs' by Michael Chabon

By Louis Nowra

There’s something of the eternal kid about Michael Chabon. Whereas other serious writers have outgrown Marvel comics, Star Trek and the rock songs of their youth, Chabon’s nostalgic sensibility is still deeply rooted in popular culture. If he mentions Burr

'Underbelly' and 'The Wire'

School for Gangsters

By Alan Saunders

“Was that like a movie or what?” says one young thug to another after a shoot-up at a petrol station. We’re in the middle of the Melbourne gangland killings, as depicted in the TV show Underbelly, and the dialogue reveals two things: that the writers of

Lars Von Trier's 'Antichrist'

Tooth and Claw

By Luke Davies

The opening five minutes of Antichrist (released nationally on 26 November) are a compelling symphony of exquisite film-making. In hyper-stylised black-and-white ecstasy – in super-slow-motion – the characters played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg make lov

Stockholm Syndrome

By Kirsten Tranter

It’s hard to escape Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo these days in bookshops: the eponymous heroine’s gorgeously rendered face glaresout from posters and book covers, from independents to Dymocks. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (Quercus, 602pp; $32.95) is the final instalment in Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium trilogy, named after the magazine for which