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Shannon Burns

Letters to the Editor - October 2015

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October 2015, no. 375

CHILDHOOD SEX!

Dear Editor,

Shannon Burns’s splendid ABR Patrons’ Fellowship essay, ‘The Scientist of His Own Experience: A Profile of Gerard Murnane’, is rich in insights and pithy observations, plus some rather fine photographs (August ...

Something for the Pain: A memoir of the turf by Gerald Murnane

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October 2015, no. 375
Shannon Burns reviews 'Something for the Pain' by Gerald Murnane

Narrators in Gerald Murnane’s novels and stories have occasionally scorned autobiography. Near the beginning of A Million Windows (2014), for example, we find: ‘Today, I understand that so-called autobiography is only one of the least worthy varieties of ficti ...

'The scientist of his own experience: A Profile of Gerald Murnane' by Shannon Burns

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August 2015, no. 373

The town of Goroke (population six hundred) stands almost exactly between Melbourne and Adelaide, in the Wimmera region of Victoria. It is, in many ways, a typical small country town. If you drive there in the morning during late spring or early summer, you’ll need to slow the car to avoid kangaroos on the road. Magpies are everywhere. Horses and other livestock m ...

Books of the Year 2014

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December 2014, no. 367

Books of the Year is always one our most popular features. Find out what our 41 contributors liked most this year – and why.

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Coetzee Colloquium

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December 2014, no. 367

Few authors summon the various modes of irony to better purpose than J.M. Coetzee. Typically, before Coetzee gives a reading, the audience can safely suppose that they are in for a good laugh, the odd squirm and cringe, and at least one moment of bewilderment. But there are exceptions to this general rule, and the several hundred people who gathered to hear Coetzee read last week, on a balmy Tuesday evening in Adelaide, were fortunate to witness an atypical performance by the Nobel laureate.

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Three Stories by J.M. Coetzee

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November 2014, no. 366
Shannon Burns reviews 'Three Stories' by J.M. Coetzee

Each fiction in this small but handsome volume emerges from an interesting, perhaps even ‘transitional’ phase in J.M. Coetzee’s writing life: between the publication of Disgrace (1999) and Slow Man (2005); before and after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. The first story in the collection also predates Coetzee’s move to Adelaide in 2002, as does, presumably, the composition of the second (whose protagonist laments the corporatisation of rural South Africa, declaring, ‘I want nothing to do with it’); the third story was presented and published as Coetzee’s Nobel Lecture.

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A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane

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August 2014, no. 363
Shannon Burns reviews 'A Million Windows' by Gerald Murnane

Since the publication of Tamarisk Row (1974), Gerald Murnane has continued to shape his own peculiar literary landscape. With The Plains (1982), he perfected the novelistic expression of his style; since then Murnane has concentrated on hybrid forms better suited to his purposes. Landscape with Landscape (1985), Velvet Waters (1990), and A History of Books (2012) are high points of this phase, but his newest fiction, A Million Windows, is in every part their equal.

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Kafka by Reiner Stach & Kafka by Reiner Stach

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April 2014, no. 360
Shannon Burns reviews 'Kafka: The Decisive Years' by Reiner Stach
Franz Kafka lived in Prague in the early part of the twentieth century, during a period of considerable turmoil. Before succumbing to laryngeal tuberculosis aged forty, he witnessed the disintegration of an empire and the subsequent formation of a republic. Kafka also endured the administrative and domestic realities of a world war and was among millions of Europeans infected with Spanish flu. He barely survived the latter, and while Europe’s political convulsions certainly left their mark on the man, most efforts to bring Kafka’s fiction and life into an explanative relation have failed. Perhaps only Elias Canetti’s slim monograph on Kafka’s letters to Felice, Kafka’s Other Trial (1974), stands as the exception. ... (read more)

Derrida: A Biography by Benoît Peeters, translated by Andrew Brown

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November 2013, no. 356
Shannon Burns reviews 'Derrida: A Biography' by Benoît Peeters, translated by Andrew Brown

By what right, and in accordance with what set of social conditions or teleological commitments, ideologies, cultural and biographical conventions, and in whose name might one begin to speak of, formulate, detail, or analyse the life of Jackie aka ‘Jacques’ Derrida?

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Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life by Robert Milder

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June 2013, no. 352
Shannon Burns reviews 'Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life' by Robert Milder

Unlike Hawthorne: A Life (2003), Brenda Wineapple’s penetrating and engaging biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s Habitations, is a work of literary criticism informed by a narrow but fascinating range of biographical details and sources. These details support Robert Milder’s construction of an author ‘divided’ by contradictory drives that remained unresolved in Hawthorne’s fiction and life.\

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