y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2023... no. 460 December 2023 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Welcome to the December issue of ABR! This month we feature illuminating commentary by Bain Attwood, Anne Twomey and Joel Deane on the historical, legal, and political implications of the Voice referendum defeat. Elsewhere, thirty-nine critics nominate their Books of the Year, James Ley writes about Ralph Ellison, Brenda Walker considers a selection of notes and letters from Alex Miller, and David Trigger reviews Michael Gawenda’s deeply personal memoir which reflects on his Jewish identity. We also review new fiction from Charlotte Wood, Suzie Miller, Tony Birch, and Laura Jean McKay. Heading Backstage, our Q&A guest is Ruth Mackenzie, Director of the Adelaide Festival.'  (Publication summary) 

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2023 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
If Looks Could Killi"Sitting in, say, Rossini’s at the Quay,", Stephen Edgar , single work poetry (p. 14)
Constellations : A Selection of Alex Miller’s Notes and Letters, Brenda Walker , single work review
— Review of A Kind of Confession : The Writer's Private World Alex Miller , 2023 single work autobiography ;
'Alex Miller’s most recent book, A Kind of Confession, begins with notebook entries from his pre-publication period – long years in which his deep trust in his identity as a writer appears to have been unshaken. In 1971, he notes: ‘I’ve been committed to writing since I was 21, 13 years. Quite a stretch, considering I’ve yet to publish.’ He was in his fifties before his first novel emerged. Yet even when he complains about his apparent failure – ‘Almost 40 and only 2 short stories published. It makes no sense’ – there is no real lapse of direction; he knows what he is. We can’t read excerpts from these early notebooks and diaries without an awareness of his later success as the winner of significant prizes, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award (twice), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Manning Clark Medal, and the Weishanhi Best Foreign Novel of the Year.' (Introduction)
(p. 18-19)
Gawenda's Journey : A Deeply Personal Story about Jewish Identity, David Trigger , single work review
— Review of My Life as a Jew Michael Gawenda , 2023 single work autobiography ;
'Michael Gawenda has written a deeply personal story about his Jewish identity. It comes during a period when conflict in Israel/Palestine has been painful for all. While he remains committed to a two-state future that supports the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in their own countries, the author critiques influential sections of the political left where acceptance has come to require demonising the Jewish state. A key message of the book is that too often on the left the only good Jew is one who publicly rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains silent when it is declared racist and nothing more than a coloniser of an indigenous population.' (Introduction)          
(p. 19-20)
The Gate : The Terrible Price of Victory for the Taliban, Kevin Foster , single work review
— Review of The Sparrows of Kabul 'Fred' Smith , 2023 single work autobiography ;

'Diplomat and musician Fred Smith’s memoir of his time with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) at Kabul airport, and later in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), processing Afghan evacuees fleeing the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, opens with a richly symbolic vignette. On his first visit to the North Gate, one of only three public entry points to Kabul airport, Smith is confronted by a nightmare vision of the country’s collapse. Amid a cacophony of screaming and gunfire, thousands of Afghans jostle, push, and kick one another, waving passports, holding babies aloft, as they fight their way towards a narrow gap in the razor wire entrance to the gate, guarded by a human wall of US Marines. Every thirty seconds or so somebody squeezes through the scrum to safety, emerging discomposed, bloodied, and bewildered.' (Introduction)          

(p. 20-21)
Soul Shifts : Reflections on Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, James Boyce , single work essay

'Thirty years ago, wanting to probe deeper into the question of what it meant to make home in Tasmania, I enrolled to do my honours year at the University of Tasmania. During a discussion with the secretary of the History Department about my partially formed dissertation ideas, she urged me to read a thesis by a recent graduate whose work had greatly impressed her: one Richard Flanagan. When I read the thesis and the book that came out of it, the result can best be described as a soul shift. It was not so much the information I gained but that Flanagan’s approach to Tasmania’s past released an imaginative flow in my own research, allowing it to slowly metamorphose over fifteen years into my first book, Van Diemen’s Land. I share this anecdote, not just to highlight what was lost when universities sacked most of their administrative staff, but to show how seriously Richard Flanagan has always taken history.' (Introduction)          

(p. 27-28)
Apotheoses and the Hölderlin Monument, Old Botanical Gardens, Tübingeni"My father is in his last hours", John Kinsella , single work poetry (p. 28)
Books of the Year 2023, Various , single work review (p. 29-36)
‘If the Story Has Holes’ : A Trite Adaptation of an Intense Play, Diane Stubbings , single work review
— Review of Prima Facie Suzie Miller , 2023 single work novel ;

'Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie is one of Australia’s most celebrated literary exports of recent years. After an award-winning run of performances in Australia, a production helmed by Killing Eve star Jodie Comer triumphed in London’s West End and on Broadway, garnering deserved accolades for Comer as well as a coveted Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2023.' (Introduction)          

(p. 38)
Naming the Bones : A Meditation on Consequence and Care, Jennifer Mills , single work review
— Review of Stone Yard Devotional Charlotte Wood , 2023 single work novel ;

''Arrive finally at about three.’ The opening sentence of Charlotte Wood’s seventh novel does a lot in five simple words, emblematic of her gift for compression. With the direct, truncated prose of a diary entry, we are suddenly on intimate terms with another mind, impatient to begin. The unnamed narrator is a woman alone, returning to the country town where she grew up and where her parents are buried. ‘Your bones are here, beneath my feet,’ she thinks, standing at their graves for the first time in thirty-five years. So begins her reckoning.' (Introduction)          

(p. 39)
Late Monroe : Michael Fitzgerald’s New Novel, Tim Byrne , single work review
— Review of Late : A Novel Michael Fitzgerald Page , 2023 single work novel ;

'Michael Fitzgerald’s new novel, Late, opens with a camera obscura, a direct reference to Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The image is a nifty one – a portrait projected across the Pacific Ocean, as well as across time itself – and it goes some way to signalling the author’s intentions: he wants to create a novel deliberately weighted by the creative works (films, books, art, and sculpture) that have come before and, for his protagonist – who in real life died on 4 August 1962 – those that have come since.' (Introduction)          

(p. 40)
Raising Silkworms : Three Women, One Legacy, Danielle Clode , single work review
— Review of The Naturalist of Amsterdam Melissa Ashley , 2023 single work novel ;

'What child has not been fascinated to watch the miraculous metamorphosis of a hungry caterpillar to pupae and then butterfly in a glass jar on the table? This transformation is such an everyday part of our ecological awareness as to be almost child’s play. What was once the cutting-edge technology of scientific observation – the transparent glass isolation chamber, the magnifying lens, and the microscope – has now become household tools for educating children, as if we must recapitulate the lessons of our historical scientific development through our own childhoods.' (Introduction)          

(p. 41)
Refusing Silence : Reiterations of Violence in Tony Birch’s New Novel, Naama Grey-Smith , single work review
— Review of Women and Children Tony Birch , 2023 single work novel ;
'In conversation with the Guardian’s Paul Daley in the final days of 2021, Tony Birch addressed the recurring presence of both strong women and violent men in his work. Citing the Sydney writer Ross Gibson, Birch said he likes to think of the common themes that a writer revisits across his or her body of work as ‘reiterations’. In Birch’s oeuvre, perhaps chief among these reiterations is the impact of male violence on family and community life – from ‘The Butcher’s Wife’ in Shadowboxing (2006) to the Kane men in The White Girl (2019). His latest book, Women and Children, brings this theme into sharp relief.' (Introduction)
(p. 42)
Pleasure and Peril : Short Stories about Embodiment, Susan Midalia , single work review
— Review of Gunflower : Stories Laura Jean McKay , 2023 selected work short story ;
'Laura Jean McKay’s new collection, Gunflower, offers a range of disturbing, deftly satiric, and sometime bizarre short stories. As in her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (2022), some of the stories in the collection explore the relationship between the human and non-human, and often challenge rational explanations or simple allegorical interpretations for the imaginative worlds they create. Even the conventional realist narratives sometimes defy generic conventions. The story ‘Flying Rods’, for example, moves from standard verisimilitude to Gothic horror. ‘Site’ transforms the familiar terrain of an adulterous affair with repeated descriptions of a ship sighted off the coast, such that the ship’s symbolic meanings remain tantalisingly unclear.' 

(Introduction)          

(p. 43)
Puzzles of the Past : Exploring the Ordworld and New York City, Bernard Caleo , single work review
— Review of Bulk Nuts Mandy Ord , 2023 selected work short story graphic novel ; New York City Glow Rachel Coad , 2023 single work graphic novel ;

'Over the decades that Ord has been producing comic strip stories, we have witnessed her develop a personal iconic picture language, and in Bulk Nuts she has honed the images to a high level of finish. To a long-time observer of Ord’s work, the drawings here are clearer, finer, more precisely observed and produced. She has always been attentive to the ways that black ink falls from her brush to the page, but the brushwork in this book is particularly acute, teetering between representation and a purely graphic emotionality. Ord’s visual metaphors are also a major contributor to her narrative voice: the heavy vocal knottiness of parents fighting, the snaky fingery acquisitive ogling at a trash and treasure market, the vibratingly smarmy responses from the guy in the television show Knight Rider to KITT, his talking car. Ord’s visual correlatives for sound and physical action lead us further along the garden path of her cartooning dialect, which develops readerly intimacy with the emotional tone and sense of humour in these comics, which has to do with vulnerability and an appreciation of the natural world.' (Introduction)          

(p. 44)
Harnessing the Internet : Dan Hogan’s Début Collection, J. Taylor Bell , single work review
— Review of Secret Third Thing Dan Hogan , 2023 selected work poetry ;

''Anything and everything, all of the time.’ This is the refrain to comedian Bo Burnham’s hilarious and subtly disturbing song ‘Welcome to the Internet’, which both precedes and succeeds endless lists of absurd metadata. The idea is that, naturally enough, we have entered an age that simply has no way to escape the internet. Everything is available to us instantly. And with that, since we no longer live within the binary of either being on or offline, life has become increasingly inextricable from what’s happening ‘over there’.' (Introduction)          

(p. 50)
Swimming between Islands : An Awkward Account of Rescue, Nick Hordern , single work review
— Review of Saving Lieutenant Kennedy Brett Mason , 2023 single work biography ;
'In August 1943, John F. Kennedy, then aged twenty-six, was rescued from the threat of Japanese captivity – or worse – by a few brave Solomon Islanders, in an operation coordinated by the Australian naval officer Reg Evans. Evans was one of the Royal Australian Navy’s ‘Coastwatchers’, intelligence collectors based perilously behind Japanese lines.' 

(Introduction)          

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 5 Mar 2024 11:55:42
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