y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2024... no. 468 September 2024 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In ABR’s September issue, writers pick over the bones, stare into the cracks, weigh, measure, and search for the words. There’s Joel Deane on Peter Dutton, Ian Hall on Narendra Modi, and Kevil Bell on homelessness. Gabriella Coslovich sums up the case against Planet Art, the world’s wealthiest museums, and Dominic Kelly ponders two conservative lamentations for the Voice. Patrick Mullins asks if we need yet another Hawkie bio, and we review exhumations of extraordinary lives by Yves Rees, Penny Olsen and Aarti Betigeri as well as memoirs by Leslie Jamison, Kári Gíslason, Olivia Laing and Theodore Ell. There’s James Ley on Rodney Hall’s thirteenth novel, Vortex, and Geordie Williamson on Fiona McFarlane’s Highway 13, plus reviews of poetry, theatre, art, essays and technology.' (Publication summary)

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2024 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Making a Gargoyle : The Larrikin Who Became Prime Minister, Patrick Mullins , single work review
— Review of Young Hawke : The Making of a Larrikin David Day , 2024 single work biography ;

'It is easy to imagine book-buyers nodding with approval at the subtitle of this biography: ‘The making of a larrikin’. With ‘larrikin’ today applied to knockabout young men who are irreverent and mischievous but genuinely good-hearted, Bob Hawke seems a quintessential example. Yes, the myth goes, he used slipshod language now and then, and was quite a sight when he was in his cups, but generally Hawkie was a top bloke, a man who would call a spade a spade, a mate who could sup with princes and paupers but never forget who he was.' (Introduction)

(p. 12-13)
Watershedi"At high tide there’s a breakaway from pounding surf.", Sarah Day , single work poetry (p. 15)
Critic of the Month with Robyn Arianrhod, single work interview

'Robyn Arianrhod is a science writer, and an affiliate of Monash’s School of Mathematics. Her reviews have appeared in Australian Book Review, The Age, Times Higher Education, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Cosmos, and Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Her latest book is Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation (UNSW Press, 2024).'  (Introduction)

(p. 24)
And the Ship Sails On : Jock Serong’s Elegant New Novel, A. Frances Johnson , single work review
— Review of Cherrywood Jock Serong , 2024 single work novel ;

'Intertextual spins on Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda may yet be finding new reading congregations. Carey’s progenitive postcolonial novel refuted landscapes empty of First Nations peoples, less jewel horizon than abject mire and macadam, along which the failed preacher Oscar and his party moved the components of a glass church overland and upriver to Edenic rural Bellingen. A metaphor of failed settler hopes and dreams, the fabulist glass church leitmotif is symbolic of white intrusion, as an omniscient Aboriginal narrator observes in the chapter savagely and simply entitled ‘Glass Cuts’.'  (Introduction)

(p. 26)
A Chorus of Souls : Fiona McFarlane’s Discursive Theodicy, Geordie Williamson , single work review
— Review of Highway 13 Fiona McFarlane , 2024 single work novel ;

'Jorge Luis Borges thought the appearance of a major new author or creative work should prompt a realignment of literature’s family tree. Fresh genealogies of influence suddenly manifested, while old antecedents could find themselves pruned to a nub. Borges knew that actions in the present can remake our sense of past and future both.' (Introduction) 

(p. 27-28)
A Web of Music : A Substantial Addition to Rodney Hall’s Oeuvre, James Ley , single work review
— Review of Vortex Rodney Hall , 2024 single work novel ;

'The title of Rodney Hall’s thirteenth novel, Vortex, means to convey something of its considerable formal and thematic ambitions. The implicit promise is that its various elements, however fragmented or disparate they may seem, will converge with the swirling inexorability of a whirlpool or a black hole. As a dynamic metaphor for the novel’s wide-ranging vision of history, the title might be interpreted as the opposite of a widening gyre, a repudiation of the terrifying prospect of mere anarchy, an affirmation of the idea that there is a shape (and indeed a gravity) to events that grants them a kind of coherence, though the fact that the ordering centre of a vortex is also the point of annihilation is hardly reassuring.' (Introduction)

(p. 29-30)
Big Meadowi"Someone has left the day wide open here", Kevin Hart , single work poetry (p. 30)
Surreal and Vertiginous : A Dizzying Fable of a Novel, Rose Lucas , single work review
— Review of The Oxenbridge King Christine Paice , 2024 single work novel ;

'There is a great deal going on in Christine Paice’s new novel, The Oxenbridge King. In this narrative, we meet the troubled soul of Richard III (1452-85), unable to find rest, a contemporary young woman who struggles with loss and misjudged relationships, an angel emerging from his chrysalis after being trapped for centuries in the cellar of the family home, and a talking bird that operates as a link between characters, places, times. In what can feel like dreamlike jolts, the parallel immediacies of 500 years ago and today keep warping and collapsing into each other.' (Introduction) 

(p. 31)
Mother Pulse : A Peripatetic First Novel, Anthony Lynch , single work review
— Review of The Degenerates Raeden Richardson , 2024 single work novel ;
'Recent decades have seen no shortage of what might broadly be called diasporic Australian novels. Works by Brian Castro and Michelle de Kretser, among others, come to mind. Raeden Richardson adds fruitfully to this tradition with his complex début novel, The Degenerates, which sets out from then-Bombay and journeys to the streets of Melbourne and New York. It is not quite a ‘constellation novel’ (the term coined by Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk), in which textual fragments and polyphonic voices build a narrative. Richardson nevertheless offers a series of story threads that slowly accumulate and nudge the boundaries of conventional form and storytelling.' (Introduction) 
(p. 32)
They Laughed Anyway : Travels with Ray Lawler's Doll, John Rickard , single work essay (p. 33)
‘Leaves Falling like Language’ : A Lyrical Index of the Natural World, J. Taylor Bell , single work review
— Review of Song in the Grass Kate Fagan , 2024 selected work poetry ;

'Australian poetry has always had a particular affinity for birds. This can be either infuriating or indispensable, depending on whom you consult. We might blame Judith Wright for this affinity – or the British pastoral tradition. We might blame the big prizes associated with ecopoems. Or we could just admit that birds are actually really cool and totally worthy of our poetic attention. Kate Fagan intuits all this with Song in the Grass, and she both leans into it and subverts it in equal turns.'  (Introduction)

(p. 41)
His Father’s Eyes : A Memoir of Roads Not Taken, Shannon Burns , single work review
— Review of Running with Pirates Kári Gíslason , 2024 single work autobiography ;

'Kári Gíslason’s memoir of escape and adventure during his early adulthood begins in transit: he is freshly eighteen, ‘sleeping on the floor next to hot air vents at the back of a grand old ferry that connected Brindisi in the heel of Italy with Athens’. Kári is travelling with an ‘often-jolly, sometimes sarcastic’ Scotsman named Paul, and their relationship has begun to fray. Worse, they are low on money, which means their travels and ‘freedom’ may soon be over. Gíslason notes: ‘We were unemployable. I was sickly thin, and my hair past my shoulders and knotted. Paul always looked like he’d just woken up.’ Both are searching for ways to forget their troubles and orient themselves as they take the first steps into manhood, but the pressures that come with such a task have left them feeling oppressed and alienated.' (Introduction) 

(p. 45)
A Questioning Lens : Falling through the Cracks of History, Kirsten Tranter , single work review
— Review of Travelling to Tomorrow : The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America Yves Rees , 2024 single work biography ;
'Yves Rees’s accessible, entertaining study blends personal experience with rich archival research into a group of disparate women who followed their passion from Australia to the United States at a time when it was relatively easy for a white woman with talent and a few connections to just show up in Hollywood or New York and get to work. They are very different women – a surfer, a dentist, a concert pianist, a nurse, a decorator, an artist, a lawyer, and a writer – all fiercely courageous trailblazers in their own way. Travelling to Tomorrow weaves their stories together in a loosely chronological shape, using deep research to ground Rees’s imagining of these women’s hopes, dreams, achievements, and disappointments.'  (Introduction)
(p. 51-52)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 5 Sep 2024 12:45:36
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