Alison Broinowski
To celebrate the best books of 2004 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors included Dennis Altman, Brenda Niall, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Morag Fraser and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
... (read more)Alison Broinowski reviews 'Shanghai Dancing' by Brian Castro
If we lived in the kind of country – and there are some – where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it. Alas, China and Australia from the 1930s to the 1960s, where Castro takes us in memory, were not such places then any more than they are now.
... (read more)'September 11: A Symposium'
Sunday, 01 September 2002Never far from one’s mind these days, the events of September 11, 2001, and their direct aftermath in Afghanistan and elsewhere, had to be prominent in this month’s issue of ABR, such is their complex resonance and ubiquitous iconography. To complement Morag Fraser’s essay in this issue on the consequences of ‘September 11’ for civic ...
Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Monkey and the Dragon' by Linda Jaivin
How seriously do we take an author who, in her mid-forties, writes about ‘street cred’, calls a department store ‘humungous’ and, discussing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, asks: ‘Bourgeois decadence? Hel-lo.’? Linda Jaivin studied one of the world’s most difficult languages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China, and, as a scholar and journalist, published perceptive analyses of China. Then she turned to fiction and biography.
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