Meanjin, Vol 70 No 4 (December 2011) Sally Heath (ed) The seventy-one-year-old literary journal Meanjin is looking elegant and rejuvenated since Sally Heath took over as editor in 2011. This is the third edition she has edited and the second to enjoy the new design makeover. White paper stock and clear typeface, use of blank […]

The Best Australian Stories: a ten-year collection Edited and published by Black Inc. This anthology is touted as the best of the best – culled from the Best Australian Stories annuals of the past decade. It is not clear how they have been selected. The nameless Black Inc. editors of this anthology state simply that […]

So this is life Anne Manne Melbourne University Press When I came to the last page of Anne Manne’s memoir So This is Life, I wept. By that time I was her closest friend and had cried and laughed my way through seventeen stories of her early life. Manne has the fundamental quality of a […]

Reading Madame Bovary Amanda Lohrey Black Inc. I was keen to read these stories by Amanda Lohrey after admiring her novella Vertigo (2008). Better known for her novels and essays, Lohrey has put together nine stories, five of them previously unpublished, for the collection Reading Madame Bovary. Lohrey has a remarkable ability to be lyrical […]

If any of you read my post about audio books, you may remember I was lying in bed with a virus, enthralled by Ian McEwan’s reading of On Cheshil Beach. Since then, I have been overseas and, much to my surprise, found myself walking along the very same Cheshil Beach in Dorset where the novel’s […]

Whatever the virus was that left me sprawled lifeless across the bed, I can thank it for putting me out of action for a week. It gave me the excuse to lie there listening to the four CDs of Ian McEwan reading his novella On Cheshil Beach. I love audio books. They take the tension […]

I read to live. My house is full of books, far more than I could ever read and I have to ration my book buying. (Imagine having an e-reader that could hold another 1500 books!) Last Wednesday I found myself accidentally caught up in the debate about e-books versus the printed book. In the afternoon […]