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Shannon Burns
Shannon Burns is a freelance writer and member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. He is a former ABR Patrons' Fellow, and has published short fiction, poetry, and academic articles. He is the author of a memoir, Childhood (Text Publishing, 2022).
Readers familiar with Robbie Arnott’s fiction will have some expectations about the kind of book the author is likely to conjure. Dusk sits comfortably inside the thematic and narrative territories he has previously explored, particularly in The Rain Heron (2020) and the wonderful Limberlost (2022). Dusk features Arnott’s typically vivid descriptive prose and his concern with the natural world ... (read more)
Kári Gíslason’s memoir of escape and adventure during his early adulthood begins in transit: he is freshly eighteen, ‘sleeping on the floor next to hot air vents at the back of a grand old ferry that connected Brindisi in the heel of Italy with Athens’. Kári is travelling with an ‘often-jolly, sometimes sarcastic’ Scotsman named Paul, and their relationship has begun to fray. Worse, t ... (read more)
One of Caledonian Road’s primary characters, Milo Mangasha, tends to speak in political slogans, which his childhood friend identifies as ‘college talk’. Readers may recognise in Milo the rhetoric of characters in Andrew O’Hagan’s previous novel, Mayflies (2020), a popular and critical success that was subsequently adapted for television. Like Mayflies, Caledonian Road is stridently cert ... (read more)
When the London theatres closed due to plague in the late 1590s, a still-young William Shakespeare composed and published ‘Venus and Adonis’, a poem about unrequited love, lust, and devotion to beauty. Shakespeare evokes a desire to touch, to kiss, to smell, to taste, to share breath. Christos Tsiolkas’s book 7½ (2021), written and published under similar circumstances, embodies some of thi ... (read more)
Emmett Stinson’s brief critical survey centres on Gerald Murnane’s four major ‘late fictions’, beginning with Barley Patch (Giramondo, 2009) and ending with Border Districts (Giramondo, 2017). It is a timely and illuminating companion to Murnane’s recent fiction and works well as an extension of the first monograph on his work, Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (Oxford University Press ... (read more)
According to its author, Who Cares? offers ‘an up-close, humane and grounded ethnographic account of life on welfare’. Eve Vincent foregrounds the perspectives of people who are subjected to ‘an endlessly reforming welfare system’. Vincent spent substantial time in the field, building relationships with her subjects, and while the history of welfare in Australia is neatly sketched and the ... (read more)
A hunter discovers a woman’s body in the woods on Christmas day, ‘hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees’, a red sash tied around her dress to make her body visible in the snow. The strong implication is that she has taken her own life. The series of events that led to her decision is one of many mysteries in The Passenger, the first of two connected and long-awaited novels by Co ... (read more)
A History of Masculinity begins with the observation that we live in a global patriarchy that restricts the rights and freedoms of women, and that remedying this situation is a matter of urgent concern. To that end, ‘we need egalitarian men who care more about respect than power’. Ivan Jablonka acknowledges the accusation that men who are active in the feminist movement simply amplify sexist d ... (read more)
Like the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain (2020), Douglas Stuart’s second novel is set in the post-Thatcher, post-industrial, working-class Glasgow housing schemes dominated by unemployment and dysfunctional families. Both novels are populated with alcoholic mothers and violent or absent fathers whose neglected children are forever vulnerable to abuse and hardship. Their titular protagonists must fit ... (read more)