If you like your fictional feasts seasoned with umami, Silence Once Begun should tempt your tastebuds. Sweet, bitter, sour and salty are standard flavours in western fare. Umami is savoury and hails from the east. It’s hard to get the right balance of flavours in fiction as in food … but in Silence Once Begun
My author profile of Mark O’Flynn and his fabulous short story collection White Light is published on the international short story forum THRESHOLDS this week. In Mark’s story ‘Red Shoes’, the shoes encapsulate much about Dorothy Hewett’s character. She’d been a Communist, feminist, atheist and sexual libertarian. The shoes are a striking symbol of how
This debut novel casts tender eyes over the life of one woman of the Irish diaspora. Tess is only a young girl when her mother dies from tuberculosis and it sets the emotional tone for much of her life. The ache travels within her to America and into love … and it spans six decades.
Orphaned buttons corralled in a tin and a fragile woman’s poems hidden in a car glove box … in this Q&A Vivienne Plumb reveals how such details helped shape the title story of her new collection, to be launched in Sydney on August 16. The Glove Box & Other Stories will be launched at the
On A Bigger Brighter World’s Facebook page this week we’ve seen cool bookstores and amazing libraries, the Man Booker longlist, the WA Premier’s shortlist and some Pen Literary Award winners. There were one hundred novels to consider and nine to recommend. There was literary Lego and literary tattoos (twice) and items about Murnane and Bolano.
There are good reasons this evocative novel about love, obsession and restrained sexual identity — set mainly in an internment camp in rural Victoria during World War II — was shortlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Award … so check it out! What are we talking about? My Beautiful Enemy is the second novel by Australian author Cory Taylor.
Lost & Found is the debut novel of the year in Australia (so far) and it’s a pearl. Brooke Davis, its 34-year-old West Australian author, is a little breathless with all the fuss — and who wouldn’t be? A week before the book’s launch in Australia, it had been sold into 25 countries to be
Dear Writer, I’m so excited that Virginia O’Day popped by this week to answer some of your curlier questions about writing fiction! Virginia is the wise narrator of Dear Writer Revisited by Australian author Carmel Bird and the book is a brilliant guide for all wordsmiths — fledgling or experienced. If you want inspiration, practical
The impact of Darren Groth’s charming new Young Adult novel Are You Seeing Me? should be seismic. If it doesn’t cause a major publishing tremor similar to that caused by The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, I swear I’ll watch Jackie Chan* movies back to back for a week (no cakewalk, for me, I’ve got
Squealing bats in suburbia, Shakespeare’s Iago talking firkins and vespiaries, Australian writer Dorothy Hewett stuck in a railway car toilet, and a sermonette in which a Jehovah’s Witness has froth at the corners of his lips “white light humming” … Mark O’Flynn’s first short story collection explores the spectrum of human experience. “Bats squeal in the trees,
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