Maya Linden
Maya Linden has lived and worked in the United States and in Australia as a writer, researcher, restaurant and bar critic, book reviewer, and teacher of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. She has recently completed a PhD on feminine masochism in women’s literature at the University of Adelaide, and her creative and critical writing has been published in many local and international journals, including Meanjin, Westerly, Life Writing and Australian Book Review, as well as several anthologies. Her website is www.mayalinden.com
Alyssa Brugman’s Alex as Well makes us question why we read. Is it something we do to escape reality, or are we drawn to other realms that may contain deeply unsettling experiences very different from our own?
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From the first sentence of Creepy & Maud, we know we are entering a volatile world. ‘My dad has trained our dog, Dobie Squires, to bite my mum,’ Creepy tells us. What follows is a vivid peek into suburban isolation and unease. Almost every character has an addiction or psychological disturbance, from alcoholism and untameable aggression to dyslexia and obsessive compulsions. This society i ... (read more)
Sea Hearts takes place in an intensely wrought setting, both unnerving and thrilling – in propinquity to our world, yet enchantingly different. We journey, with a series of intriguing characters, through brutal landscapes where the wind is ‘swiping like a cat’s paw at a mousehole’.
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Darkness, both literal and symbolic, pervades these two recent books. Darkwater, the first Young Adult title by established writer Georgia Blain (author of four novels, including Closed for Winter, 1998), and a début book, This is Shyness by Leanne Hall, trace the aftermath of events in which brightness gives way to ‘sudden black’ in the lives of teenage characters.
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