Luke Horton
Luke Horton is a Melbourne-based writer and bookseller. He recently completed a PhD in history at the University of Melbourne and his literary journalism has appeared in various publications.
The circumstances around the publication of Dodge Rose, Jack Cox's début novel, have attracted considerable attention in Australian literary circles. A choice publicity tale as to how the novel was rescued from the slush pile by American publisher Dalkey Archive Press has contributed to this. So have claims advanced by Dalkey Archive that Dodge Rose is 'the most astonishing début of the decade', ... (read more)
Reviews Index 2015
ABBOTT, Edward, The English and Australian Cookery Book and The English and Australian Cookery Book Companion: 1864-2014 Sesquicentenary Edition, The Culinary Historians of Tasmania, 368/67, Christopher MenzACTON, Peter, Poiesis: Manufacturing in Classical Athens, Oxford University Press, 369/56, Glyn DavisADAMSON, Robert, Net Needle Poems, Black Inc., 377/42, A. J. CarruthersA ... (read more)
With Ghost River, Tony Birch returns to a world he has delineated over many short stories and in his first novel, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Blood (2011): the world of adolescents living on the margins. Invariably in trouble and in unstable family environments, the adolescents in Birch's fiction tend to find in their marginal status a degree of freedom. They use this freedom to explore what he ... (read more)
Over the last year, Italian enigma Elena Ferrante has become one of the most passionately advocated literary sensations of our time. Enigma, because 'Elena Ferrante' is a pseudonym and no one other than her publisher knows her identity, Ferrante had published several novels before the Neapolitan series, but it is this cycle of four novels, culminating in The Story of the Lost Child (Storia della b ... (read more)
Despite their disparate subject matter, the central concerns of Geoff Dyer’s books remain the same. Whether he is writing about photography, D.H. Lawrence, taking you scene-by-scene through Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, or, as in Another Great Day At Sea, spending two weeks aboard a US aircraft carrier, his abiding concerns – the self, the nature of writing, why one would go to the trouble of ... (read more)
In 2013, publisher Sigrid Rausing significantly reduced Granta magazine’s staff, and long-time editor John Freeman resigned. At this news, various high-profile contributors, including Peter Carey, expressed their concern for the future of the magazine. But if we can judge solely on the quality of this edition, the new Rausing-edited Granta has lost none of its verve. It remains chock-full of fin ... (read more)
In Boyhood Island, the third volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s internationally acclaimed My Struggle cycle, we are taken back to where the series began: an island in southern Norway, seven-year-old Karl Ove and his older brother Yngve live under the tyranny of a cruel and taciturn father in the mid-1970s. Unlike the first volume, A Death in the Family (2012), which stays with young Karl Ove for on ... (read more)
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) forged one of the most remarkable careers of his generation. Starting in the 1890s, often considered the nadir of race relations in the United States, he became the first black man to hold a Harvard bachelor’s degree; emerged as Booker T. Washington’s most eloquent opponent on the issue of segregation; published pioneering work across many genres, ... (read more)
Sleepers Publishing are up to Almanac No. 9. Despite the ever-increasing competition from newer literary journals, the high quality of this annual short-fiction anthology remains intact. Eschewing the theme-based model used by many journals and instead offering diversity in subject, style, and tone, the Almanac has never been anything less than an intriguing read, and this is certainly true this t ... (read more)