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Keywords: Books

  • AUSTRALIA

    Venerable shards from Broken Hill

    • Bernard Appassamy
    • 20 September 2022

    The shards are earthenware with geometric or figurative coloured patterns. Their cracked glazes and ragged edges echo the outback raw aesthetic, and allude to the ongoing challenging narratives of Broken Hill. Now they are sitting large on my desk claiming a distinctive extraction value from a mining city, and whispering, like books on a homely shelf, an intimate lasting merit.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A moral compass at the centre of J.K. Rowling's Ink Black Heart

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 07 September 2022
    4 Comments

    So far it hasn’t been easy to find a review in Australia from someone who has actually read the sixth and latest book in Rowling/Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike crime series, The Ink Black Heart. l wonder if it is too much to ask for people to simply read books (any books) before holding opinions about them.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Telltale

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 02 September 2022
    1 Comment

    Australian cultural icon and erstwhile publisher Hilary McPhee calls Telltale ‘a rare thing, an ingenious memoir,’ and she is right. It is interesting and reassuring to note that books about reading and recollections of reading habits seem to be proliferating. Perhaps such writing is a defence measure against worrying developments like universities in England, for example, axing their English Literature courses.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: The Matter of Everything and the Premonitions Bureau

    • Juliette Hughes 
    • 28 June 2022
    1 Comment

    How do we know that what we call knowledge is knowledge? How do we know that we know? The two books I have been reading here are both about kinds of knowing. Suzie Sheehy is a particle physicist from my old stamping ground, Melbourne University. Sheehy’s story is of passionate hunters for nothing less than the meaning of everything. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Opening up the world: The Utopian vision of Cole’s Book Arcade

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 19 April 2022
    6 Comments

    Edward Cole understood that books encouraged community. The businessman could rub shoulders with the tramp in his Arcade. Now, in an age of division and isolation, more than ever we need spaces which facilitate community; light-filled cathedrals dedicated to the love of knowledge and stories, and their power to cross borders, politically, ideologically and culturally.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The problem of new nihilism

    • Joel Hodge
    • 05 October 2021
    63 Comments

    Does life have meaning? Or, as the new nihilists suggest, is life meaningless? A new book, The Sunny Nihilist, by writer and journalist, Wendy Syfret, puts the case for nihilism as an antidote to the obsessive search for meaning and purpose that many modern people experience.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    It's the end of the world as we know it

    • Sandra Renew
    • 25 May 2021
    3 Comments

    On the day of the millionth case and half million deaths I drink coffee in a warm, morning living room, walk a small dog at our national Arboretum, eat lunch of seafood and avocado at a local outdoor café, buy two likely looking books on Amazon, tune into a Zoom poetry reading and listen to podcasts from America. I realise it’s the end of the world, as we know it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    True friendship

    • Barry Gittins
    • 04 February 2021
    2 Comments

    All three of us are parents, we’ve all been adversely impacted by COVID-19, and prior to that we’ve shared the usual rough and tumble dynamics of male friendships and bridal party affiliations. We have been in and out of each other’s good books, hard conversations, interpersonal dynamics and orbits. We’ve been through a lot as mates. COVID-wise, though, that affinity has been at a remove.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Friends and Rivals and the ocean in the shell

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 01 May 2020
    1 Comment

    In Friends and Rivals Brenda Niall brings together four significant Australian women writers. Between them they published works from the 1890s to the 1950s. Ethel Turner and Barbara Baynton were from NSW. Nettie Palmer and Henry Handel Richardson were from Victoria, both schooled at Presbyterian Ladies College.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Look to Finland for housing solutions

    • Dustin Halse
    • 07 August 2019
    7 Comments

    Robert Harris' The Gang of One ranges through Harris' five published books and a number of uncollected poems. Early work grows from his occasionally lonely, knockabout life and reveals not only a talent for catching the essence of fleeting memories and perceptions but also a mordant touch that gives edge to memory.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The sometimes ironic perception of 'things'

    • Brian Matthews
    • 02 August 2019
    4 Comments

    Robert Harris' The Gang of One ranges through Harris' five published books and a number of uncollected poems. Early work grows from his occasionally lonely, knockabout life and reveals not only a talent for catching the essence of fleeting memories and perceptions but also a mordant touch that gives edge to memory.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Kindness stories that are good for the spirit

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 July 2019
    10 Comments

    Among writers familiar in Australia who write in this vein are Michael McGirr, Terry Monagle and the much missed Brian Doyle. Their writing does not merely describe but evokes and creates a world, and shapes a human response that respects its variety and mystery. These qualities are evident in Julie Perrin's Tender.

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