Review by Tristan Foster Let’s talk, briefly, about fights. Humans love a fight – fighting is among the first things we do: the fight for breath, for attention, the fight …
Goodness and Dangerous Freedom: Beryl Fletcher’s Juno & Hannah
Review by Tristan Foster The story opens with a river in flood. The rain has kept Juno and Hannah inside, and at the first opportunity they hurry out, down to …
Dancers in Violet (Tristan Foster)
First time I left her home, I looked up and a stiff fruit-bat was dangling from the electrical wire. Next time I left her home, the bat was in the …
Just a Little Bit Brilliant: Anthony Macris’ Great Western Highway – a love story
By Tristan Foster One thing is clear: we live in strange times. The influence of the market has seeped into every facet – every wrinkle – of our existence, leaving …
Smart and Taut Exploration of Modern Warfare: Andrew Croome's Midnight Empire
Review by Tristan Foster LinkLock, a technology company based in Canberra, has developed a method of encrypting and securing data feeds in a way that makes them theoretically impossible to …
A Story Somewhere in the Distance: Anthony J. Langford's Bottomless River
Review by Tristan Foster It’s summertime in an Australian east-coast country town, school is done for the year and, to three bored friends, a night of riverside drinking sounds like …
Untruths Sculpted into Truths: Merlinda Bobis' Fish-Hair Woman
Review by Tristan Foster In a recent interview with Amitava Kumar, Michael Ondaatje spoke about the need for multiple voices and various narratives in stories of political or social consequence. …
Untruths Sculpted into Truths (Tristan Foster)
In a recent interview with Amitava Kumar, Michael Ondaatje spoke about the need for multiple voices and various narratives in stories of political or social consequence. “You want the politics …
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 …
MOUNTING THE FIGHT: an interview with Anthony Macris
With the release of his latest book, you could be forgiven for thinking that more than a decade in academia teaching aspiring writers the fundamentals of literary theory, and writing …