Accessibility Tools
Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
Subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, Google, or Spotify, or search for ‘The ABR Podcast’ on your favourite podcast app.
Episode #199
This week on the ABR Podcast, we continue to celebrate the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize with the second of three episodes featuring the shortlist. This week’s story is ‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse. The judges had this to say about ‘M.’: ‘Wittily told, this rollicking tale set in New York City is at once a character study of the garrulous oddball M and a tragicomic portrait of the narrator herself, whose compulsions and choices see her avoiding the everyday joys of her life as a mother.’ Shelley Stenhouse, a New York City-based poet and fiction writer, recently won the Palette Poetry Prize. Listen to ‘M.’, published in the August issue of ABR.
Saturday. The usual 9 a.m. flight.
The man beside me hefts a Gladstone.
‘I haven’t seen one of those in years,’
I say, this being sociable Saturday.
I recall a worn one from my twenties
owned by someone else. Always empty
When I was a student, the professor used to say that Australian literature had no intellectual content. That was the way professors spoke back then. He might have had A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson in mind; Paterson was an enormously popular writer, who didn’t let difficult ideas get in the way. Paterson is the sort of writer who goes straight to the sentimental core of his material. He does not chase after profundities or wrestle with conceptual difficulties.
Paterson could not care less about professorial pursed lips and all that. When, in 1895, his first volume, The Man from Snowy River, and Other Poems, was published, it sold out within a week. Paterson was a sensation, both here and abroad. The Times enthused, and Rudyard Kipling, with whom Paterson was immediately compared, congratulated Angus & Robertson, the publishers.
... (read more)