'Melbourne singer-songwriter CLARE BOWDITCH , 44, has written a memoir that details how she learned to confront anxiety and depression while pursuing a career in music.' (Introduction)
'Mirrah Foulkes chose to base her first feature film on a famous puppet show, writes Philippa Hawker'
'One of the nation's best-known media dynasties comes under the microscope in a new play, writes Rosemary Neill'
'Alex McClintock has written a very good boxing book and a not very good boxing book. As a memoir of McClintock’s brief amateur boxing career, On the Chin is a triumph.'
'How timely is The Memory Pool, an anthology of recollections about swimming and swimming pools? Ambiguous summer looms, season of leisure and terror, but as temperatures rise we will be hankering for a refreshing dip and remembering swims from our past.' (Introduction)
'In Tim Winton’s novel The Riders, Scully arrives at the airport to pick up his wife and daughter but only young Billie is there. This palpable sense of disquiet is also in Christian White’s new novel, The Wife and the Widow, when Kate and daughter Mia wait at the airport for husband and father John, who is a no-show. Yet this time it is more unsettling, the gash deeper.' (Introduction)
'When American writer Flannery O’Connor had difficulty writing her debut novel, she pretended to herself that every chapter was in fact a self-contained short story, the form with which she was most comfortable. This trick she played on herself allowed her to complete her first full-length work of fiction, Wise Blood.
'The nine individual chapters of Anna Krien’s first novel, Act of Grace, contains many of the features of the modern short story (starting, as Chekhov advised, in the “middle of things” and ending with narrative resonance, rather than resolution).' (Introduction)
'When I first had small children, I used to say that all I wanted for them in life was to find a good job, a caring partner and to be happy. Simple. Or maybe not so simple — because that’s everything, isn’t it? It’s what we all hope for, and it’s not easy to find.' (Introduction)
'Helen Garner’s diaries reveal a writer full of complexity'
