As Christos Tsiolkas notes in his back cover puff, Tony Birch’s storytelling skills have been widely acknowledged since the publication of Shadowboxing in 2006. Many people have been waiting to see how Birch would fare with a full-length novel. His début, Blood, is nothing short of outstanding. Birch has finally found a home at University of Queensland Press, where he has his staunch champion, ... (read more)
Chris Flynn
Chris Flynn is the author of three novels, the most recent of which is Mammoth (2020). His latest book is a collection of short fiction, Here Be Leviathans (2022).
British author Glen Duncan released his eighth novel this year, the title of which, The Last Werewolf, is fairly self-explanatory. Although a much more philosophical (and entertaining) read than one might imagine in our current supernaturally-dominated ‘box-office’ novel landscape, Duncan’s book was a marked departure from an author better known for his explicitly literary output. Of his pre ... (read more)
Lawyer Nicki Greenberg spent six years converting The Great Gatsby to graphic novel format, an interesting project that was universally acclaimed and respected. It took half that time for her to render Shakespeare’s Hamlet (is the author’s name really necessary?), which she has ‘staged on the page’ for stalwart Australian graphic novel publisher Allen & Unwin. An ambitious task, Greenb ... (read more)
A native of Western Australia, Goldie Goldbloom now resides in Chicago with her eight children, whom she gleefully admits, in her amusing introduction to this volume of short stories, to trouncing regularly at Scrabble, ‘with little or no compunction’. Her lyrical and inventive use of language in these eighteen stories comes as no surprise, then. More puzzling is that only four of these origin ... (read more)
A more appropriate moniker for this year’s Black Inc. collection might be ‘Bleak Australian Stories 2010’. Either the editor’s taste runs to the morose or Australian writers need to venture outside and enjoy the sunshine a little more. Reading these twenty-nine stories, one could be forgiven for believing Australia to be the most broken, miserable country on earth. Ryan O’Neill’s caust ... (read more)