Don Anderson
Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose, largely of texts from the Americas, Australia, and Europe. For fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular literary columnist in the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was for thirty years a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, where he taught American, Irish, and Australian literature, and literary theory. He was for some years a member of the Advisory Panel of ABR.
From August 1978 through January 1979 I read the complete fiction of Christina Stead, as well as those of her critical writings I could locate. A writing career of more than forty years consumed by a voracious reader in six months! I trust that I was as scrupulous and sympathetic a reader as Christina Stead is an ethically and technically scrupulous, sympathetic novelist.
I read this commanding b ... (read more)
Richard Ford, born in 1944, is a North American novelist, short story writer, and anthologist of considerable distinction. His recurring character Frank Bascombe – The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), Let Me Be Frank with You (2014) – is a commanding figure of American letters to rank with John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, each a protagonist used by his ... (read more)
Prelude
From this I shall evolve a man.This is his essence: the old fantoche
Hanging his shawl upon the wind,Like something on the stage, puffed out,
His strutting studied through the centuries.At last, in spite of his manner, his eye
A-cock at the cross-piece on a poleSupporting heavy cables, slung
Through Oxidia, banal suburb …Professor Eucalyptus responds to the host.
If the proof o ... (read more)
As for this letter you describe – so explicit, so extreme, that at the moment of its first description the reader might ejaculate across its pages-is it not the condition to which all writing has aspired? Demanding that admission of desire (no matter how unlikely, how unspeakable), an honesty, so absolute it would produce a masterpiece.
John A. Scott, What I Have Written
A masculin ... (read more)
There has been altogether too much talk recently about literature and bliss, and not enough about sadness. Think of the gloom that descends when you have read all the works of a beloved author, and no fresh fields and pastures new remain. Years ago, I suffered this depression after reading all the works of William Faulkner. There was a brief respite when Flags in the Dust, an ur-version of Sartori ... (read more)
‘Few evade full measure of their fate.’
Hart Crane, ‘The Bridge’
Just before the publication of her novel Dark Places in 1994, Kate Grenville said that she was thinking about her next book, ‘a heart-warming old-fashioned love story’. Well, The Idea of Perfection – and isn’t that what all love stories are about? – is that love story, though it warms both heart and head, ... (read more)
‘History always emphasises terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war, according to Antony Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). Few events in recent history were more terminal than the Holocaust, it might be urged. Yet the singularity of that ‘terminus’ has been questioned in recent years. Is it, however, perilous for ... (read more)
Clive James needs no introduction, though he asked Julian Barnes to provide one for Reliable Essays, a selection from three decades of James’s literary journalism made by his publisher, Peter Straus. The Kid from Kogarah is, as The New Yorker once famously observed, ‘a brilliant bunch of guys’: literary essayist (his ‘best work’, Barnes insists), television critic, poet, novelist, autobi ... (read more)
The last words of the endnotes to John A. Scott’s most recent novel – earlier ones have won the Victorian Premier’s prize for fiction and been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award – and thus the last words of this book, if we exclude back-cover plaudits, read: ‘An additional narrative strand, chronicling the history of Surrealist André Breton in Melbourne, 1952, omitted from this ve ... (read more)