Anthony Lynch
Anthony Lynch writes fiction, poetry and reviews. His work has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Island, Australian Book Review, The Saturday Paper, The Age and The Australian, and been read on ABC Radio. His books are a short story collection, Redfin, and a poetry collection, Night Train. He is the publisher for Whitmore Press. A new collection of stories, HomeFront, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in mid-2025.
True Stories: Babes in Hollywood, directed by Dan Sturman and Dylan Nelson (2011)
An American wannabe child star told the workshop of his still-born brother. How his mother had said the lost one, endlessly cast in a silent movie, looked just like himself. Niagara broke over the boy’s cheeks. The fat kid to his left, cast always as a bully, patted his arm. The workshop leader said That’s great ... (read more)
In 1982 a young Steve Kelen published a slim volume by an even younger poet by the name of Luke Davies. Four Plots for Magnets was a chapbook of thirteen poems written mostly when the poet was eighteen and nineteen. Published by Glandular Press, an outlet established by Kelen and the painter Ken Searle in 1980, this ‘sampler’ (as Kelen later calls it) was in a monochrome, staple-bound format. ... (read more)
Early in his Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton quotes the Russian formalist critic Roman Jakobson: ‘[literature is writing that represents] organised violence committed on ordinary speech.’ I don’t know if Corey Wakeling has been influenced by the formalists’ theories, but Goad Omen, his energetic first collection, is replete with estranging devices that bring attention to p ... (read more)
‘Tell me about it: you can trust me. I’m a writer.’ This ‘cautionary joke’ – one of few in this sober volume – cited in an essay by Frank Moorhouse, could be an epigraph for the latest Westerly. Editors Bird and Hughes-d’Aeth asked a selection of writers to share their thoughts on the ethics of writing. The ensuing essays include depictions of the past and of family in non-fiction, ... (read more)
Brook Emery’s opening poem in Collusion is addressed to ‘Dear K’, an address reprised in the last, movingly lyrical poem in this his fourth collection. We might read the intervening poems as a correspondence with ‘K’, this other who halfway through the collection is referred to as ‘my interlocutor, my conscience’. Emery cleverly anticipates and plays with the possible relation to tha ... (read more)
Cate Kennedy’s fine second collection of short stories, Like a House on Fire, is of a determinedly realist bent. Metafictional play does not generally form part of Kennedy’s armoury, and the mostly low-rent settings and struggling characters reprise what in the 1980s and early 1990s was briefly known as dirty realism, though Kennedy’s prose is not as resolutely spare as that of some writers ... (read more)
Percy Grainger has been the subject of a number of books (most notably a 1976 biography by John Bird), a play (A Whip Around for Percy Grainger, 1982) by Thérèse Radic, and a feature film, Passion (1999), by Peter Duncan. He was an avid letter-writer, and his correspondence has been anthologised and critiqued. Thanks to his eccentric way of life and sometimes erratic behaviour and opinions – h ... (read more)
In his polemical Introduction, Les Murray notes that Quadrant was founded sixty years ago by poet James McAuley, the ‘stern formalist’ who ensured that poetry occupied a prominent place in the magazine. Poetry has continued to be central to Quadrant, its profile not waning under Murray’s stewardship as literary editor since 1990. For this anthology, Murray has collected the best poems publis ... (read more)
‘Dark satanic mills won the day’, S.K. Kelen tells us in one of his strongest poems, ‘Slouching’. ‘Cold modernity followed, a brooding European / monochrome hinted at worlds passing (the good old days).’ What many critics take to be William Blake’s damning of the Industrial Revolution – ‘And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills?’ (from ‘And did those f ... (read more)