W.H. Chong

Omar Nassif and Enzo Cugliari are fringe-dwellers, beyond ‘white trash’. That harshest of middle-class put-downs fairly locates their distance from the outsider types who claim our interest. Omar and Enzo are anti-charismatic, their physical selves undescribed. In contrast, Ari, the angry child of migrants in Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995) wants drugs, sex and dancing, and inevitably his ... (read more)

To prove the fairyness of tales, this world’s relationships start at ‘Happily’ and only then progress to their trials. The Park Bench tells what happens when hope of the ‘ever after’ fades into that space bordered by numb disappointment and the aggressive need to regain sensation. In gay fiction, that place is no man’s land. ... (read more)

The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past; it keeps coming back as different novels, and writers do things differently there. Nazi Germany remains history’s prime hothouse from which to procure blooms for fiction’s bouquet. All those darkly perfumed spikes – drama and tragedy intrinsic, memory within recall. David Whish-Wilson’s début novel opens in Berlin, 1934. Our hero is th ... (read more)

The coffin sat on a chrome trolley at the front of the pews. In the end we only need a box six feet by two, and how small it looks ... the imagination falters. Helen Garner, in her eulogy for Diana Gribble, delivered at Christ Church, South Yarra, spoke of finding out what ‘publishers’ were like. In 1976 she pedalled over to the new McPhee Gribble offices in Jolimont bearing the manuscript of ... (read more)