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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #184
In this week’s ABR Podcast, Michael Shmith reviews a memoir from poet, novelist, librettist, and Adelaide GP Peter Goldsworthy. The book’s title is The Cancer Finishing School. Shmith begins by observing that doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill, before immediately recognising this as the useless delusion of a patient. Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor whose most recent book is Merlyn, a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer. Listen to Michael Shmith’s ‘It might be …: P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet’, published in the April issue of ABR.
What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.
... (read more)Lachlan Murdoch will almost certainly be the next head of News Corp, one of the world’s largest media companies and the dominant force in Australia’s media landscape. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Patrick Mullins, visiting fellow at the ANU’s National Centre of Biography, reviews a new biography of Lachlan Murdoch by Paddy Manning, titled The Successor: The high-stakes life of Lachlan Murdoch. Listen to Mullins read ‘Dual Focus’, which appears in the December issue of ABR.
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