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Geordie Williamson

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In Search of Mary Shelley: The girl who wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

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August 2018, no. 403
Geordie Williamson reviews 'In Search of Mary Shelley: The girl who wrote Frankenstein' by Fiona Sampson

A healthy suspicion should surround books that arrive neatly on some commemorative due date – in this case, the bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is not that biographer Fiona Sampson is less than able and diligent in her efforts to celebrate a novel which has resonated like ...

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Last Stories by William Trevor

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June-July 2018, no. 402
Geordie Williamson reviews 'Last Stories' by William Trevor

‘In nearly all Trevor’s stories,’ wrote V.S. Pritchett almost four decades ago, ‘we are led on at first by plain unpretending words about things done to prosaic people; then comes this explosion of conscience, the assertion of will which in some cases may lead to hallucination and madness.’ Even here, in this collection ...

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2017 Books of the Year

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December 2017, no. 397

To celebrate the best books of 2017 Australian Book Review invited nearly forty contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Michelle de Kretser, Susan Wyndham, James Ley, Geordie Williamson, Jane Sullivan, Tom Griffiths, Mark Edele, and Brenda Niall.

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The Passage of Love by Alex Miller

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November 2017, no. 396
Geordie Williamson reviews 'The Passage of Love' by Alex Miller

Every author has some version of origin story: a narrative describing what it was that first compelled him or her to write, or at least what attracted them to the role. You can hear the tale harden into myth as an emerging author shapes themselves to those obligatory rubrics of self-disclosure required by writers’ festivals. Sometimes ...

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The Best Australian Essays 2016 edited by Geordie Williamson

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March 2017, no. 389
Glyn Davis reviews 'The Best Australian Essays 2016' edited by Geordie Williamson

An annual challenge: how to select essays which capture the moment but live beyond the immediate?

For some, rigour matters. The series editor for The Best American Essays invites magazine editors and writers to submit contributions to a Boston postal address. The rules are strict: an essay is a literary work that shows ‘an awareness of craft and f ...

2016 Publisher Picks

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December 2016, no. 387

I’m fresh from Hannah Kent’s compelling, humane, and utterly convincing The Good People (Picador, 10/16). Kent completely inhabits her material. In this single nineteenth ...

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News from the Editor's Desk - May 2016

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May 2016, no. 381

ABR'S NEW PARTNERSHIP WITH MONASH UNIVERSITY

Australian Book Review is delighted to announce a major new partnership with Monash University.

This alliance between ABR and the internationally renowned Group of Eight university augurs well for students, scholars, writers, and readers. The magazine ...

The Best American Essays 2015 edited by Ariel Levy & The Best Australian Essays 2015 edited by Geordie Williamson

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March 2016, no. 379
James McNamara reviews 'The Best American Essays 2015' edited by Ariel Levy and 'The Best Australian Essays 2015' edited by Geordie Williamson

At the back of the cupboard of old lies is a crusty one that goes like this: the essay is a lesser form of literature. Oddly, it is perpetuated in collections like Ariel Levy's The Best American Essays 2015, which – in its foreword by series editor Robert Atwan – bashfully admits that essays are the B-team of the writing world. 'The quintessential essay ...

The Simple Act of Reading edited by Debra Adelaide

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January-February 2016, no. 378
Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Simple Act of Reading' edited by Debra Adelaide

Let's start with the title. The act of reading is anything but simple, as Fiona McFarlane and Gabrielle Carey both point out. Eyes, brain, and mind cooperate to create from a series of symbols with no intrinsic representative value a coherent message, or some amusing nonsense, or a persuasive argument, or a boring anecdote, or a parade of transparent lies.

D ...

Books of the Year 2015

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December 2015, no. 377

Jennifer Maiden's The Fox Petition: New Poems (Giramondo) conjures foxes 'whose eyes were ghosts with pity' and foxes of language that transform the world's headlines

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