Georgia White

Georgia White reviews 'Blue Hour' by Sarah Schmidt, 'Bone Memories' by Sally Piper, and 'Sunbathing' by Isobel Beech

August 2022, no. 445 • 28 July 2022

In a famous letter to her friend and fellow writer Lorna Sage, Angela Carter declared that no daughter of hers should ever pen a title like Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945): ‘BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.’ The choice between getting sad or getting mad, the dilemma of how to represent the reality of fem ... (read more)

Georgia White reviews ‘To Paradise’ by Hanya Yanagihara

March 2022, no. 440 • 21 February 2022

In 2015, Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel A Little Life was published to a critical response so effusive as to seem almost hyperbolic. Jon Michaud of the New Yorker described the novel’s depiction of the Promethean repetitiveness of trauma as ‘elemental, irreducible’; Garth Greenwell declared in The Atlantic that ‘the great gay novel’ had finally been written. Even critics who viewed th ... (read more)

Georgia White reviews 'Animal' by Lisa Taddeo

August 2021, no. 434 • 26 July 2021

In the prologue to her first book, Three Women (2019), a work of non-fiction exploring the structures and expressions of desire, Lisa Taddeo writes that she had not initially intended to focus on women. ‘I thought I’d be drawn to the stories of men. Their yearnings. The way they could overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee.’ It was not until she began interviewing her subjects that she ... (read more)

Georgia White reviews 'The Serpent’s Skin' by Erina Reddan, 'Other People’s Houses' by Kelli Hawkins, and 'Sargasso' by Kathy George

June 2021, no. 432 • 26 May 2021

Is it tautological to describe a work of fiction as ‘family Gothic’? After all, there’s nothing more inherently Gothic than the family politic: a hierarchical structure ruled by a patriarch, as intolerant of transgression as it is fascinated by it, sustaining itself through a clear us/them divide, all the while proclaiming, ‘The blood is the life.’ Yet three new Australian novels Gothici ... (read more)

Georgia White reviews 'Flyaway' by Kathleen Jennings

November 2020, no. 426 • 22 October 2020

At the heart of every fairy tale, there is violence: Snow White’s stepmother calling for her heart on a platter, Cinderella’s sisters mutilating their feet to fit the silver shoe. ‘All the better to eat you with, my dear,’ says the wolf, his belly already stuffed with grandmother’s flesh. From this bloodletting, the fairy tale tries to spin something wondrous, turning straw into gold and ... (read more)