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Issue Details: First known date: 2020... no. 419 March 2020 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Welcome to the fiery March 2020 issue of ABR! Our cover features a luminous, shocking photo from the New South Wales bushfires. Award-winning historian Tom Griffiths writes about this ‘season of reckoning’ during which we saw ‘the best and worst of Australia: the instinctive strength of bush communities and the manipulative malevolence of fossil-fuelled politicians’. Elsewhere, Dominic Kelly writes about privilege and The Economist; Yves Rees reviews several trans memoirs; and we have reviews of new novels by Louise Erdrich, Anne Enright, Philip Pullman, Evie Wyld, and Catherine Noske.' (Introduction)

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2020 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
'Season of Reckoning' : An Essay, Tom Griffiths (presenter), single work podcast
'After this calamitous summer, this 'season of reckoning' as he puts it, celebrated historian Tom Griffiths reflects on names given to bushfires – all those Black Sundays and Mondays, etc. – and wonders if they truly capture what is new about this savage summer.' (Publication summary)
(p. 9-10)
Birdsi"Retired, my father", Belinda J. Rule , single work poetry (p. 13)
A Multifarious Mind, Kári Gíslason , single work review
— Review of Aftershocks : Selected Writings and Interviews Anthony Macris , 2019 selected work essay review ;

'At the beginning of this wide-ranging collection of criticism by the novelist, critic, and academic Anthony Macris, the author notes wryly that an early candidate for the book’s title was Personality Crisis, such is its diversity of topics and styles. The implication here is that reviews and essays form a kind of autobiography. I’m not sure I would use the word ‘crisis’ to describe it, but certainly the portrait we have in this case is of a writer driven by very different kinds of curiosity: about literature and writing but also the art forms that lie beyond them – and, as centrally, by a social and political curiosity about the ways those forms change when they respond to the world around us.' (Introduction)

(p. 18)
Rewriting Lawson, Ellen van Neerven , single work review
— Review of The Drover's Wife : The Legend of Molly Johnson Leah Purcell , 2019 single work novel ;

'Leah Purcell has described how her lifelong fascination with Henry Lawson’s iconic 1892 short story provided her with abundant creative ammunition. Her mother read her the story when she was five; it held a special place for them both. ‘I’d say the famous last line: “Ma, I won’t never go drovin ... she’d tear up”.’' (Publication summary)

(p. 24)
Larrikins, Gerard Windsor , single work review
— Review of Collected Stories Louis Nowra , 2019 selected work short story ;
'Collected Stories is a misleading title for Louis Nowra’s new publication. It’s nothing as uniform as that. Apart from poetry, is there any genre in which Nowra has not made his mark? He’s a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, memoirist, local historian, essayist, reviewer, feature journalist – and the author of one enduring Australian gem in Così (1992), in all its multiple forms. Yet he has scouted out other territories and the results jostle together in Collected Stories. Such a title conjures up a lifetime’s labour in the genre – gatherings of Anton Chekhov or John Cheever or Alice Munro. But Nowra’s volume is essentially a ragbag of disparate writings.' (Introduction)
(p. 25)
Splintered by Salt, Felicity Plunkett , single work review
— Review of The Salt Madonna Catherine Noske , 2020 single work novel ;
'From the mainland, the fictional Chesil Island appears to float on the horizon. Perched above its bay, a statue of the Virgin Mary spreads its arms, its robes ‘faded and splintered by salt’. This icon of the miraculous and maternal, crafted from trees and symbolic of the invasion and settlement of Indigenous land, is imposing and worn, revered and neglected.' (Introduction)
(p. 26)
Bearing Witness, Amy Baillieu , single work review
— Review of The Bass Rock Evie Wyld , 2020 single work novel ;
'In a 2013 interview with British literary magazine Structo, Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld recalls lamenting to a writing tutor that she wanted to write a big action thriller, ‘something with Arnold Schwarzenegger and machine guns and blood and explosions’ but was always writing ‘really quiet little paragraphs about Dads’. These paragraphs evolved into her haunting début novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009). Wyld’s Miles Franklin Award-winning second novel, All the Birds, Singing (2013), was followed by a graphic memoir produced in collaboration with Joe Sumner, Everything Is Teeth (2015), detailing childhood summers spent on Wyld’s grandparents’ sugar cane farm and her shark fixation. The Bass Rock, her new novel, may not be a big action thriller either, but it is far from quiet and there is plenty of blood.' (Introduction)
(p. 27)
City of Shadows, Stephen Dedman , single work review
— Review of True West David Whish-Wilson , 2019 single work single work novel ;
(p. 28)
Inner Worlds : Three Debuts about Female Experience, Susan Midalia , single work review
— Review of Melting Moments Anna Goldsworthy , 2020 single work novel ; The Light After the War Anita Abriel , 2020 single work novel ; Wearing Paper Dresses Anne Brinsden , 2019 single work novel ;

'Three recent début novels employ the genre of the Bildungsroman to explore the complexities of female experience in the recent historical past.' 

(p. 29-30)
Vegasi"Yes, death was a good career move for Mr Elvis", Peter Goldsworthy , single work poetry (p. 30)
James on Larkin, Geoff Page , single work review
— Review of Somewhere Becoming Rain : Collected Writings on Philip Larkin Clive James , 2019 selected work essay ;

'To some it may seem solipsistic to be reviewing what is, in effect, a collection of reviews, but when the reviewer in question is as smart as the late Clive James and the subject is as substantial as Philip Larkin (1922–85) this is unlikely to be the case.' (Introduction)

(p. 31)
Stead's America, Anne Pender , single work review
— Review of Christina Stead and the Matter of America Fiona Morrison , 2019 multi chapter work criticism ;
'In spite of the hundreds of scholarly articles, dozens of monographs, and two biographies on the life and work of Christina Stead (1902–83), critics, curiously, have not generally sought to divide up Stead’s career into her Australian, European, and American periods for the purposes of their analysis. Most of them have regarded her career as more integrated, recognising the fact that Stead responded to all the places in which she lived and that her interest in the people around her drove her approach to her work, informed her settings, and nourished her understanding of ideology and its impact on human behaviour. In this compact study of five of Stead’s novels, Fiona Morrison seeks to explore Stead’s particular interest in American politics and culture and their specific influence on her writing.' (Introduction)
(p. 33)
Publisher of the Month with Jane Curry, single work interview (p. 34)
Home and Haven, Kerryn Goldsworthy , single work review
— Review of Love Is Strong as Death 2019 anthology poetry ;

'The assertion that ‘love is strong as death’ comes from the Song of Solomon, a swooning paean to sexual love that those unfamiliar with the Old Testament might be startled to find there. Songwriter and musician Paul Kelly has included it in this hefty, eclectic, and beautifully produced anthology of poetry, which has ‘meaningful gift’ written all over it. ' (Introduction)

(p. 40)
Fringes of Sleep, James Jiang , single work review
— Review of The Espionage Act : New Poems Jennifer Maiden , 2020 selected work poetry ;

'W.H. Auden once rebuked Percy Shelley for characterising poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. To think this way is to confuse hard with soft power, coercion with persuasion. Poetry, as Auden famously wrote, ‘makes nothing happen’; he instead bestowed Shelley’s epithet upon ‘the secret police’. But in an age of surveillance and information warfare that has militarised the channels of everyday communication, the line between hard and soft becomes more difficult to draw. The very notion of a random or innocent signal seems laughably naïve as we are inundated by new suspicions and suspicions of news. But the state of mind in which there is always more meaning to be had is one that poetry invites us to inhabit. For Shelley, poems were ‘hieroglyphs’ and the poetic imagination an ‘imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man’. Is the poet an agent, then, of this secretive control? Perhaps Shelley was on Auden’s side all along.' (Introduction)

(p. 41)
Insights, Colin Nettelbeck , single work review
— Review of Chis : The Life and Work of Alan Rowland Chisholm (1888-1981) Stanley Scott , 2019 single work biography ;
'In his lifetime, Alan Rowland Chisholm was widely regarded as an Australian national treasure, and the new biography by Stanley John Scott is compelling evidence that he deserves to remain recognised as one today.' (Introduction)
(p. 45)
Will of Iron, John Rickard , single work review
— Review of Judith Anderson : Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage Desley Deacon , 2019 single work biography ;
'In the past we have tended either to ignore or to marginalise cultural ‘expatriates’. In today’s cosmopolitan culture, we are more used to varied career paths, but it is still possible for someone who has made most of their career abroad to be overlooked. Judith Anderson is a case in point. Born in Adelaide in 1897, Francee Anderson (her first stage name) made her professional stage début in 1915 in Sydney, but from 1918 she was, virtually for the rest of her life, based in the United States. Desley Deacon’s substantial, superbly illustrated biography rescues Anderson from obscurity and reveals the full extent of her remarkable career on stage, in film, and on television.' (Introduction)
(p. 51)
Seasonality, Rayne Allinson , single work review (p. 56)
Open Page with Andrew Ford, single work interview (p. 58)
[Review] Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam, Susan Lever , single work review
— Review of Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam Steve Rodgers , 2018 single work drama ;
(p. 60)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 17 Apr 2024 10:38:50
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