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Kerryn Goldsworthy
Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Limit of the World’. A former Editor of ABR (1986–87), she is one of Australia’s most prolific and respected literary critics. Her publications include several anthologies, a critical study of Helen Garner, and her book Adelaide, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. In November 2012 she was named as the inaugural ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow. Her Fellowship article on reviewing, ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, appeared in the May 2013 issue of ABR.
It seems like a slender connecting thread, but reading Kate Grenville’s new novel, Dark Places, reminded me of an experience I had hoped I’d forgotten: reading American Psycho. Reading stories with repellent narrators is like being left alone in a locked room with somebody you’d edge away from if you met him, or her, in a bar.
Such stories are unsettling in the way that good satire is unset ... (read more)
The characters in Helen Garner’s new novella The Children’s Bach make up the kind of social molecule in at least one of which all of us feature as an atom.
Athena, who emerges as the core character, runs a household of, initially, four: herself, her husband Dexter Fox (we are not told what surname Athena uses), and their sons Arthur and the ‘strange’ Billy. Then there’s Elizabeth, with ... (read more)
‘To our bodies turn we, then, that soWeak men on love revealed may look;Love’s mysteries in souls may growBut yet the body is his book.’
John Donne, ‘The Ecstasy’
‘...the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who ... am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes? It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she thinks of herself as interm ... (read more)
‘If you can’t say something nice,’ my mother always said, ‘don’t say anything at all.’ (I pinch this opening gambit, shamelessly, from Kate Grenville’s Self-Portrait in the last ABR, and hope she does not mind; imitation is the sincerest form etc.) Apropos of parental expectations regarding niceness-or-silence, however, I am reminded of a remark of Elizabeth Jolley’s: ‘I think my ... (read more)
Studying at the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley were both living in Women’s College. Burgmann recalls:
Very late one night when I was sitting in my room, struggling with John Donne … I heard a clump clump clump coming along the corridor. Opening my door, I discovered Nadia – wearing a red flannel nightie and gumboots – on her nightly mission ... (read more)
Why do we like interviews so much? There must be a reason. Maybe it’s the lure – too often, alas, as in lurid – of confession: the ‘X Reveals All’ syndrome that deceives the mind into thinking it has always wanted to know what it is (finally) about to be told; or the more elevated sense of privilege and honour felt by those in whom such truths are confided.
... (read more)
I don’t usually reply to Letters to the Editor, but … Since this lot (see opposite) is particularly atrabilious, a lovely word I have just learned from Don Anderson, I feel moved to make a few mild replies. Ken Gelder and Gerard Windsor are big boys now and can look after themselves, but I will say that John Carroll’s is the only negative response I have seen or heard to Windsor’s June Sel ... (read more)
I recently took part in a forum on contemporary Australian fiction, a discussion during which the publisher on the panel talked about popular and/or ‘middlebrow’ fiction, and about her ire with reviewers who either simply trashed such novels, or else insisted on emphasising their status as ‘popular fiction’, and on discussing them within the context of its generic expectations and limitati ... (read more)
This year’s annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature was held in mid-July at James Cook University in Townsville, to which some two hundred delegates flocked to soak up ideas, information, sunshine, and the odd ale. Everybody had a good time except possibly the indefatigable organisers, Tony Hassall, Robert Dixon, and Stephen Torre, who, if they were not too ex ... (read more)