Review by Robert Goodman Neal Stephenson, one of the Godfathers of cyberpunk and deliverer of massive, engaging tomes full of historical and philosophical fun returns to the present day, real world (of sorts) …
The Breathtaking and the Bewildering: Patrick West's The World Swimmers
Review by Robert Goodman Short stories are their own particular art form. Like poetry, they are often the expression of an idea or a mood or a character. A distillation …
Thoroughly Modern Poets in Triptych: Blemish Books' Triptych Poets Issue Two
Review by Mark William Jackson On my bookshelves, after my chronologically ordered issues of Overland, Meanjin, Going Down Swinging etc., after my poetry collections, alphabetised by poet’s surname, sit the …
Myths Singing off the Page: A.S. Byatt's Ragnarok
Review by Robert Goodman AS Byatt, the grand lady of English letters, is best known for her lengthy tomes exploring the minutiae of English life. As she admits in an …
The Leading Role of Simple Things: Irma Gold's Two Steps Forward
Review by Tristan Foster Australia is a big country but a small place, so when Nam Le’s 2008 short story collection The Boat won nearly every major literary prize in …
A Worthy Mirror of Reality: Tim Richards' Thought Crimes
Review by Ben Carmichael There are those who maintain that the principal aesthetic/moral aim of literature is ‘to hold a mirror up to reality’. Tim Richards’ Thought Crimes certainly does …
Everything is as it should be: Jessica Au's Cargo
Review by Bel Woods If Puberty Blues was one extreme of teenage beach culture, Cargo is another. It’s the loners; the kids who mature quietly at the fringes, drift, dip their toes into the …
The White Silence after the Full-stop: Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03
Review by Ben Carmichael The unnamed narrator of Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03 is a seething mind. His thoughts, which comprise the novella’s uninterrupted, paragraphless soliloquy, obsess over such topics typical to …
The Circumstances of a Book: Ed Byrne’s Poems from the City
Review by Geoff Page It’s rare that the circumstances of a book’s publication are more interesting than the book itself but, sadly, this is the case with Ed Byrne’s Poems …
Hatton's Hunger: Stu Hatton's How To Be Hungry
Review by Mark William Jackson Bukowski once said, ‘Don’t play with madness, madness doesn’t play.’ Likewise, don’t play with words unless you know what you’re doing. Stu Hatton knows what …