JM Coetzee’s ‘The Schooldays of Jesus’ is defined by its strangeness
The antipodes of the imagination
To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, JM Coetzee is an author whose work resists readers’ intelligence almost successfully. At sentence level, he is, of course, a model of clarity...
Rediscovering the novels of Randolph Stow
In conscious exile
The Text Classics series has had some coups since its inauguration in 2012 – re-publication of works by David Ireland and Elizabeth Harrower spring to mind – but nothing on this...
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‘Acute Misfortune’ by Erik Jensen
Robert Hughes’s notorious 1988 demolition of the New York art-world darling Jean-Michel Basquiat was called ‘Requiem for a Featherweight’. Erik Jensen’s brief, episodic biography...
A long-lost novel sees the light after 40 years
The return of Elizabeth Harrower’s ‘In Certain Circles’
Martin Amis recently said something surprising. In an interview for the Guardian newspaper, the incorrigibly controversial novelist was recounting years of teenage alienation and...
Alex Miller's 'Coal Creek'
Some writers’ imaginations are roused most strongly by the view from their doorsteps. John Updike created a literary cosmos from the small-town, middle-class...
The clown v. the critic
The competing sides of Clive James
There is a phenomenon that astronomers call “gravitational lensing”. When the light from distant, brilliant stars passes an object of sufficient mass, it performs a...
The Best of Australian Literature 2012
Let’s prick the bubble of contemporaneity for once. Two lost books by a centenarian author were published in 2012. Happy Valley is the first reissue of Patrick White’s 1939 debut...
JM Coetzee - ‘Summertime’, 2009
Fiction masterpiece
Is it a cheat to suggest this quasi-memoir by a South African–born Nobel Prize winner as the best work of Australian fiction since the dawn of the new century? Perhaps it shows...
Sonya’s Hartnett’s ‘Midnight Zoo’
Strange beasts
Two boys enter a small town under cover of darkness, one of them carrying a baby in swaddling. It is Europe in wartime; even so, the village is more ruined than most, and wholly...
‘Indelible Ink’ by Fiona McGregor
On meeting Marie King, the heroine of Fiona McGregor’s fourth novel, I was reminded of Brett Whiteley’s painting of an ageing society hostess. His subject is impeccable at first...
‘Lovesong’ by Alex Miller
“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...
‘Zeitoun’ by Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers first met Abdulrahman Zeitoun during a visit to New Orleans, following the launch of Voices from the Storm, a volume of oral history published by McSweeney’s in late...
