Jeff Sparrow onKilling p9

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J U LY 2 0 0 9
Readings Monthly
I m a g e f r o m j e f f s p [ a r r o w ' s n e w b o o k K I L L I NG ( M U P ) s e e pa g e 9
your independent book, music and DVD newsletter • events • new releases • reviews
Jeff Sparrow on Killing p9
July book, CD & DVD new releases. More July new releases inside.
fiction
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fiction
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fiction
$29.99
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NON-Fiction
$32.99
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NOn-fiction
$35
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DVD
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POp CD
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CLASSICAL
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July Event Highlights at Readings. See more Readings events inside.
andy griffiths
At westgarth
theatre,
Northcote
helen garner
At READINGS
hawthorn
brian castro
At readings
carlton
anne summers
At READINGS
hawthorn
All shops open 7 days. Carlton 309 Lygon St 9347 6633 Hawthorn 701 Glenferrie Rd 9819 1917 Malvern 185 Glenferrie Rd 9509 1952
Port Melbourne 253 Bay St 9681 9255 St Kilda 112 Acland St 9525 3852 State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street 8664 7560
email [email protected] Find information about our shops, check event details and browse or shop online at www.readings.com.au
2 Readings Monthly July 2009
This Month’s News
From the Editor
‘Magical’ review
for House of Exile
Evelyn Juers must be
delighted with the rave
review her book The House
of Exile (Giramondo, PB,
$32.99) recently received
in the Times Literary Supplement, which called it ‘scintillating and rather magical
... an extraordinary book, and a really rare
accomplishment’. It’s an ambitious biography of Heinrich and Nelly Mann and their
diverse cast of fellow European artistic and
intellectual exiles in America, while World
War II raged at home – ambitious not just
in the originality and scope of her subject,
but in her evocative, intensely creative,
novelistic approach. Helen Garner and
David Malouf were among the book’s vocal
fans when it was published here late last
year. TLS reviewer Michael Hofmann
wrote: ‘I would wish it many thousands
of readers … she plays a grandiose and
suspenseful game of literary pooh-sticks
under the arches of the years; she offers a
detailed and evocative faits divers of exile
(which after all, as Joseph Brodsky claimed,
is a tragicomedy). It is amazing how those
years, and those people, and those dramas
all live in her pages.’
Nick loves Sonya
Fans of Nick Hornby –
whose name is almost a
byword for intelligent, funny
popular novels (High Fidelity,
Fever Pitch) – no longer have
to wait for his next book.
The pop culture scribe blogs
intermittently at nickhornby.
campaignserver.co.uk. In a recent-ish post
about the joys of getting to sample books
and music ahead of the general public, he
gave quite a rap to Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly
(Hamish Hamilton, PB, $29.95). ‘You
should buy it, because it’s beautiful. Butterfly
is a dreamy, lyrical, sad novel about the
relationship between a lonely girl and her
equally lonely next-door neighbour in the
Australian suburbs. It’s exquisitely written –
you end up re-reading sentence after
sentence – and unforgettable.’ I absolutely
concur. Incidentally, Hornby's next book,
Juliet, Naked (PB, $32.95) will be released
late this year.
Sign of the Times
The death knell of the book
has been sounded so many
times that no one pays
much attention any more
– but a new trend in US
bookshops does strike a
disquieting note. More than one author
reports being asked to sign e-book devices
like the Kindle at book-signing events.
David Sedaris, the literary world’s aficionado
of the bizarre, told the New York Times
recently that he’d signed ‘at least five’
Kindles, ‘a fair number’ of iPods ... and last
year in Austin, a woman’s leg. She later had
his signature tattooed into her flesh. That’s
committed fandom for you.
—Jo Case
CINEMA NOVA
RECOMMENDS:
Make a purchase at Readings for
your chance to receive one of 25
double passes to either film.
C
I
N
E
M
A
380 LYGON ST CARLTON
www.cinemanova.com.au
NEw-look
readings monthly
Marilynne Robinson
wins Orange
2009 miles franklin
goes to tim winton
IMPAC winner
Readings Monthly has had a makeover! Our
new tabloid format, printed by The Age, gives
us the space for more news, reviews and features – and what's more, we're now printed
on recycled paper. If you didn't receive your
Readings Monthly in the mail, you must have
forgotten to resubscribe. But it's never too
late! Please email [email protected].
au or call one of our shops to update your
details. In the meantime, why not accidentally-on-purpose take this copy home from your
local cafe or your friend's coffee table ...
The winner of this year's
Miles Franklin Award - Tim
Winton for Breath (Hamish
Hamilton, PB, $24.95) is
both a big surprise and no
surprise at all. A surprise
because Christos Tsiolkas's
word-of-mouth bestseller The
Slap, overall winner of this year's Commonwealth Prize, had become the clear favourite
to win. And not a surprise because Winton
started the race as prize favourite, because
Breath has already been awarded last year's
Age Book of the Year Award, and, well,
because it's a very fine piece of writing indeed
by one of Australia's leading novelists.
Reviewing Breath for Readings, Mark Rubbo
wrote: 'Winton's descriptions of the sea and
the act of surfing are magical and represent
some of his finest writing ... Breath is a powerful disturbing novel, beautifully written; it
must be one of Winton's best works yet.' In
The Age, James Bradley concluded: 'In a way,
of course, Breath is a curious novel for a writer
such as Winton to be writing, not least
because at its heart it is the sort of coming-ofage story one might normally expect to find
in the work of a much younger and less-experienced writer. Yet its seeming simplicity is
deceptive, for beneath its pared-back surfaces
lies all the steel of a major novelist operating
at full throttle in a territory he has spent 25
years making his own.'
Alice Munro wins Man
Booker International
Canadian short story writer
Alice Munro has won the
Man Booker International
Prize, awarded for a body of
work, aged 77. ‘Her work is
practically perfect,’ said
judge Jane Smiley. ‘Any writer has to gawk
when reading her because her work is very
subtle and precise.’ Another judge, writer and
critic Amit Chaudhuri, praised Munro’s
commitment to the short story form. ‘Lesser
writers would have produced a good or
mediocre novel, or three or four, over the
years,’ he told the Guardian. Munro – who,
ironically, has spoken of her desire to write a
novel – is the author of 11 short story
collections. Her newest collection, Too Much
Happiness, will be published this year – and
will hopefully attract a new wave of prizerelated interest, in addition to her many loyal
fans (some of whom work at Readings).
(See our Alice Munro bargains on p15).
The Orange Prize for the best novel written
by a woman was awarded to Marilynne Robinson’s Home (Virago, PB, $25), in a unanimous decision by the judges. Following on
from the Pulitzer prize-winning Gilead, Home
takes up the story of wayward son Jack who,
after decades away, edgily, uneasily, but finally,
returns home. Fi Glover, chair of judges, said:
‘The profound nature of the writing stood
out, as has the ability of the writer to draw
the reader into a world of hope expectation,
misunderstanding, love and kindness.’
The City of Melbourne and Melbourne
Library Service are proud to announce the
inaugural Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing
Awards, marking the City of Melbourne’s
status as the second UNESCO City of Literature. Project partners include CAE, DA
Information Services and Readings. Closing
date for entries is Monday, 31 August, giving
entrants three months to submit work and
have the chance to win a prize in one of four
award categories, or the $5000 grand prize.
Visit http://www.melbournelibraryservice.
com.au/whatson8.htm for more info.
An American debut novelist who’s ‘never
really had a real job’ has won the 2009
IMPAC, the world’s richest literary prize,
worth £100,000. Man Goes Down by Michael
Thomas (Grove Atlantic, PB, $24.95) spans
four days in the life of a black man from Boston, married to a white woman, broke and
estranged from his family, with just four days
to find the money to keep them afloat. The
New York Times called the book ‘an impressive
success’ and praised Thomas’s ‘exceptional eye
for detail’. In Dublin to receive the award,
Thomas said: ‘I'm stunned. I had a hard
time believing I'd made the shortlist – or the
longlist, for that matter – so I'm still waiting
for the punch line.’
My Friends, My Loves
competition
Thames & Hudson
Turns 60
Victorian Community
History Awards 2009
In July 2009, Thames & Hudson will celebrate 60 years of proud independent publishing. Coincidently, it is their 40-year anniversary in Australia! To celebrate, Thames
has chosen 20 of its most influential titles
from across the years and will publish them
as special limited edition collector’s items.
These are limited to 1000 sets worldwide.
And for July only, the top 40 bestsellers from
the iconic World of Art Series will be reduced
to just $12.95! For almost 50 years, these
high quality red-and-black books have been
the essential reference for visual arts and cultural history. One lucky Readings customer
will win a set of World of Art titles and an
exclusive sixtieth anniversary prize pack. Just
answer the question: ‘Who founded Thames
& Hudson?’ and email your answer to clare.
[email protected] by 31 July.
Hint: visit www.thameshudson.com.au.
MIFF 2009
The Melbourne International Film Festival
is an iconic event in Melbourne’s cultural
calendar. Screening almost 300 films from
world-class festivals including Cannes, Sundance, Berlin and Toronto, MIFF runs from
24 July to 9 August. MIFF is also Australia’s
largest showcase of new Australian cinema
and the most vocal champion of emerging
and established local film-making talent.
For further information and ticket sales visit
www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au. You
can win a double pass to MIFF Opening
Night Screening and Gala at Hamer Hall
on Friday 24th July. Email your name and
contact details to clare.mckenzie@readings.
com.au with a reason why you should attend
the Opening Night Screening & Gala in 25
words or less. Entries close Monday 13 July.
Only the winner will be notified.
GARY
DONALD
CHIPS
JACK
BOND PLEASANCE RAFFETY THOMPSON
WAKE IN FRIGHT
The fully-restored Australian classic directed
by Ted Kotcheff from the novel by Kenneth Cook.
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
OFFICIAL COMPETTION 1971
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
OFFICIAL SELECTION
CANNES CLASSICS 1971
Lord Mayor’s Creative
Writing Awards
NOVEMBER
20
NOW SHOWING
Hopscotch Films has organised an exclusive
screening for Readings subscribers to the film
My Friends, My Loves. For your chance to win
one of 100 double passes to the screening at
Cinema Nova on Tuesday 14 July at 6.45pm,
go to http://hopscotchfilms.com.au/RSVP/
readings. When Mathias moves from Paris to
London’s South Kensington to join his best
friend, the divorced Antoine, they decide to
establish a new household for their kids by
moving in together. With a nod to the warm
humour of screenwriter Richard Curtis (Notting Hill, Love Actually), My Friends, My Loves
is tender, light-hearted entertainment.
The Victorian Community History Awards,
sponsored by Information Victoria, help to
keep our true stories alive. This year’s overall
winner is The Chinawoman (Ken Oldis, PB,
$34.95), published by Arcadia in association
with the State Library of Victoria. Though
this book reads like fiction, the copious,
verifiable endnotes attest to its authenticity as
Melbourne history. The novel investigates the
1856 murder of the prostitute Sophie Lewis,
known as ‘the Chinawoman’ because of her
association with Chinese men.
State Library of
Victoria Foundation
The State Library of Victoria Foundation
raises funds and attracts support to help
the State Library to deliver services and
programs to the community and to preserve Victoria’s cultural heritage. Anyone
can support the Foundation. For only $75
(inc GST), Foundation membership is an
enjoyable way to engage in the cultural life
of the Library. Members are also entitled to
a number of benefits including 10% of all
full-priced books at Readings at the State Library. For more information, call 8664 7280
or email [email protected].
We want your pictures!
Readings turns 40 this year. To commemorate, we are putting together an image
retrospective! We would like any photos you
may have in Readings, about Readings, with
a Readings bag that you would be happy
to share with us. We'll take a copy and give
yours right back – and we'll certainly be
thanking you publicly. Email chris.gordon@
readings.com.au, ring (03) 9341 7740, or
send them by post to Chris Gordon, 309
Lygon Street, Carlton, VIC 3053.
The sixth film in JK Rowling’s blockbuster series
FOR GROUP
BOOKINGS
visit our website
cinemanova.com.au
and follow the
group bookings
link for details
STARTS JULY 15
Readings Monthly July 2009 3
Readings Events in July
All our Readings book and music events are
free, unless otherwise stated. To see more events
or for updates on new events please visit the
events page at www.readings.com.au.
4
andy griffiths
Much loved children’s writer
Andy Griffiths is back with
his new book – Just Macbeth
(Pan, PB, $14.99). Crazy
times ahead …
Saturday 4 July, 10am,
Westgarth Theatre, High
Street, Northcote. Book
now on 9347 6633. Limited seats!
7
gretel killeen
In The Night My Bum Dropped (Viking, PB,
$29.95), Gretel Killeen takes a long, hard
and hilarious look at herself in the wake of
her generation’s next obstacle course – the
looming shadow of the Female Midlife
Crisis. Tuesday 7 July, 6.30pm, Readings
Hawthorn. Free, but book on 9819 1917.
7
steve wilde &
Michelle mackintosh
Steve Wide and Michelle Mackintosh are a
creative duo working in Carlton. Their new
children's book is It’s a Jungle in Here (Windy
Hollow Books, HB, $14.99). This is a a fun,
lively book that will be a hit with both kids
and parents. Tuesday 7 July, 6.30pm,
Readings Carlton. Free, no need to book.
8
sean dooley
Following on his success with The Big
Twitch, Sean is back with his new story –
Cooking with Baz: Getting to know my Dad
(A&U, PB, $27.99). Join us for a night of
tales and domestic joy. Wednesday 8 July,
6.30pm, Readings Carlton. Free, but please
book on 9347 6633.
8
dr morris jones
The Australian Institute of International
Affairs is proud to present Dr Morris Jones
speaking about his new book, The New
Moon Race (Rosenberg, HB, $49.95).
Wednesday 8 July, 5.30pm–7pm, Dyason
House, 124 Jolimont Road, East
Melbourne. Please book on 9654 7271.
9
justin clemens
In Villain (Hunter, PB, $19.95), Justin
Clemens invokes the spirit of infamous
French poet, vagabond and thief François
Villon. Justin Clemens teaches at the
University of Melbourne. Thursday 9 July,
6pm, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, 6pm. Free, no need to book.
9
andrew mcdonald
Tony Wilson will launch
The World’s Greatest Blogger (Hardie Grant, PB,
$16.95) by new young adult
writer extraordinaire Andrew
McDonald. This lively book
makes the ordinary extraordinary, as seen through
he eyes of one’s of life’s observers. Thursday
9 July, 6.30pm, Readings Carlton. Free,
no need to book.
10
david sornig
Berlin, New Years Eve. A young architect
abandons the apocalyptic heat of a Melbourne summer for the streets his grandfather
once walked. The Spiel (UWA, PB, $26.95),
has begun. David Sornig was the 2008/09
Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East
Anglia. He lectures in creative writing at
Flinders University. Novelist Michael Meehan
will launch. Friday 10 July, 6.30pm, Readings Carlton. Free, no need to book.
13
brian castro
Marion Campbell will
launch Brian's new novel,
The Bath Fugues (Giramondo, PB, Was $29.95, Our
price $24.95), a meditation
on melancholy and art. In
the form of three interwoven
novellas, centred respectively
on an aging art forger; a Portuguese poet,
opium addict and art collector; and a doctor, who has built an art gallery in tropical
Queensland. Monday 13 July, 6.30pm,
Readings Carlton. Free, no need to book.
14
peter sutton
in conversation with
marcia langton
Well-known anthropologist, Peter's new book
is The Politics of Suffering (MUP, PB, $34.99).
This is an important book about the decline
in indigenous health and conditions in the
last 30 years. Given that we are coming up to
the two-year 'anniversary' of the NT Intervention, this event is very timely. Tuesday 14
July, 6.30pm, Readings Carlton. Free, but
please book on 9347 6633.
15
terrI psiakis
Part-memoir, part-guide, Tying The Knot
Without Doing Your Block (Ebury, PB,
$24.95) documents the experiences of comedian Terri Psiakis during the planning of her
wedding. Most wedding guides are formal,
stuffy and contain little or no information
for soon-to-be-married blokes. Not this one!
Wednesday 15 July, 6.30pm, Readings
Carlton. Free, no need to book.
16
nick earls
Nick Earls is back with The True Story of Butterfish (Vintage, PB, Normally $32.95, Our
special price $27.95). With his chart-topping
band, Butterfish, Curtis Holland lived the clichéd rock dream. Later, Curtis is ill-prepared
for his neighbour, a 16-year-old schoolgirl
who’s a confounding mixture of adult and
child. And he is surprisingly drawn to her
remarkably unremarkable family. Thursday
16 July, 6.30pm, Readings Hawthorn.
Free. RSVP to [email protected].
16
patrick allington
What if you saved a man’s life? What if that
man went on to play a leading role in the
bloodiest revolution of modern times? In
Figurehead (Black Inc., PB, $29.95), Patrick
Allington takes readers deep into the world
of power politics and agents of influence.
He enters the worlds of Nhem Kiry and Ted
Whittlemore, and with humour, intelligence
and an unfailing moral sense, brings them to
life. Thursday 16 July, 6.30pm, Readings
Carlton. Free, but book on 9347 6633.
17
the stillsons
From the band’s first recording, Birds,
recorded in a run-down back-packers in St
Kilda, The Stillsons have risen from humble
beginnings to releasing one of the most
fresh, intense releases this year. Friday 17
July, 6pm, Readings Carlton. Free, no need
to book.
21
kings way
Duro Cubrilo, Martin
Harvey and Karl Stamer,
have created a comprehensive
account of the first decade of
the graffiti writing subculture
in Melbourne, Kings Way:
The Beginnings of Australian
Graffiti: Melbourne, 1983-93
(Miegunyah, HB, $64.99). Kings Way tells
the story of the development of a hard core
underground scene of local writers. Tuesday
21 July, 6.30pm, Readings Carlton.
Free, but please book on 9347 6633.
22
the intimate archive
The Intimate Archive (Maryanne Dever , Ann
Vickery, Sally Newman, UNSW Press, PB,
$34.95) recounts journeys through the private
literary papers of three quite distinct Australian literary figures: Marjorie Barnard, Aileen
Palmer and Lesbia Harford. Professor Deirdre
Coleman, Robert Wallace Chair of English,
University of Melbourne will be launching
the book. Wednesday 22 July, 6.30pm,
Readings Hawthorn. Free, no need to book.
26
catherine deveny
in conversation
with mirka mora
Catherine and Mirka will chat about sex and
creativity. Mirka Mora is one of Melbourne’s
best known and loved artists. Mirka’s 50
years of creative energy have resulted in a
prolific output of work across a range of
media. Not to be missed. Sunday 26 July,
4-6 pm. North Fitzroy Star Hotel, cnr of
Newry & St Georges Rd South, Fitzroy
North, Mel ref 44 A2. Please book on
9553 6810 or email [email protected].
au. $25 Full $20 (Concession)
27
michael mcgirr
Michael McGirr was a Jesuit for 20 years
and a Catholic priest for seven. After
leaving the church, he went on to become a
founding staff member of Eureka Street. In
The Lost Art of Sleep (Picadore, PB, $32.99),
McGirr muses on the many benefits of sleep,
and explains aspects of its strange personality. Monday 27 July, 6.30pm, Readings
Hawthorn. Free, please book on 9347 6633.
28
fellowship of
australian authors:
Helen garner
Helen Garner will speak of her successful
writing career, from her first book 1977’s
Monkey Grip to 2008's The Spare Room. The
Fellowship is the oldest writing organisation in Australia. Tuesday 28 July, 6.30pm,
Readings Hawthorn. Free, but please book
on 9819 1917.
22
jeff sparrow
How hard is it to kill an
animal – or a human? In
Killing (MUP, PB, $34.99),
these questions lead Jeff
Sparrow on a physical and
psychological journey of
discovery across Australia and
the US, talking to veterans,
slaughtermen, executioners and writers about
one of the last remaining taboos. Jeff is editor
of Overland. He writes regularly for Crikey.
Wednesday 22 July, 6.30pm, Readings
Carlton. Free, please book on 9347 6633.
23
henry jackson
& patrick mcgorry
The Recognition and Management of Early
Psychosis: A Preventative Approach (CUP,
PB, $99) looks at how psychotic illness is
managed and treated with best results. The
Hon. Lindsay Tanner will be launching this
book. Thursday 23 July, 6.30pm, Readings
Carlton. Free, no need to book.
24
adrian parr
In Hijacking Sustainability
(MIT, PB, $51.95), Adrian
Parr attacks Hollywood
environmentalism, sustainability in politics, and the
greening of junk space. The
convergence of popular
culture and the sustainability
movement has given corporations an
opportunity to ‘ecobrand’ their products.
But that branding-often makes no more
than superficial gestures to sustainability.
Friday 24 July, 6.30pm, Readings Carlton.
Free, no need to book.
29
judith lanigan
Judith Lanigan is an international freelance
circus artist, Her debut novel, A True History
of the Hula Hoop (Picador, PB, Normally
$29.95, Our special price $24.95), is about
two women born centuries apart but joined
by the spirit of adventure and a quest for true
love. Wednesday 29 July, 6.30pm, Readings
Carlton. Free, but please book on 9347 6633.
29
steven isserlis
We are delighted to have one of world's
most acclaimed cellist in the shop, signing
copies of his books (Why Handel Wigged
the Wig and Why Beethoven Threw the Stew,
Faber, PB, $14.99) and CDs. Wednesday
29 July, 6.30pm, Readings Hawthorn.
30
anne summers
The Lost Mother (MUP, HB, $34.99) is a
poignant, interweaving narrative about
author Anne Summers’ relationship with
her mother, told through her search for a
lost painting of her mother as a child. Anne
Summers is a bestselling Australian author,
journalist and speaker on political and social
(especially women’s) issues. Thursday 30
July, 6.30pm, Readings Hawthorn. Free,
but please book on 9347 6633.
Please see our website for advance news on our
August events, including James Halliday on
Tuesday 4 August, 6.30pm, Hawthorn shop
(Tickets $15 per person includes tastes and
cheese) and Peter Bakowski in conversation
with Justin Clemens, also on Tuesday
4 August (6pm for 6.30pm, Carlton shop).
New Australian Writing Feature
Axing the Frozen Sea Within
Gregory Day interviews internationally acclaimed Irish-Australian novelist M.J. Hyland
comfort zone. She describes the book as ‘a
monster, like a 100,000-piece jigsaw I had to
put together without a picture on the box’.
But she is adamant that the disturbing nature
of the subject matter had nothing to do with
the difficulties of the process. ‘Maybe I’m
unusually dissociative or something, but the
content is neither here nor there,’ she says. ‘I
set out to write interesting drama, and for my
‘It’s got to be about
what happens to
people when they rub
up against each other,
when they fuck each
other up, and fuck
themselves up. Life
is intense, right?’
M.J. Hyland was born in London, spent her
early childhood in Dublin, and her adolescence and early adulthood in Australia.
Hyland now lives in England, where she
teaches in the Centre for New Writing at
Manchester University. Her literary career
began in Australia, with her promising 2003
debut, How The Light Gets In (Penguin
PB, $24.95). It was followed by the astonishing, Booker-shortlisted Carry Me Down
(Text, PB, $23.95) in 2006. Gregory Day,
who admiringly reviewed Carry Me Down
for The Age in 2006, spoke to M.J. Hyland
about her latest book, This is Now (Text,
PB, Our special price $27.95) for Readings'
New Australian Writing Feature series.
M
.J. Hyland took a lot of people
by surprise when she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in
2006. The disturbing but ultimately redemptive Carry Me Down was the follow-up to her
promising debut, How the Light Gets In. This
second novel demonstrated Hyland’s fearless
approach to the precarious psychological
territory which inspires her, expressed largely
through the unforgettable character of John
Egan: a freakishly tall and dislocative 11-yearold, dangerously at odds with his peers and
family. J.M. Coetzee went so far as to describe
Carry Me Down as ‘writing of the highest order’ – and along with the Booker shortlisting
came numerous other awards and plaudits.
Most importantly perhaps, it became clear
among that hardcore of writers and readers
who take little notice of the literary prize circuit that a compelling new voice had emerged
in our midst – a writer with a real-life urgency
about her, possessing a rare combination of
sympathy for the marginalised and an entirely
unsentimental command of her craft.
Now comes Hyland’s third book, the disturbing and stoic This Is How. The time is the late
1960s; the place is a small English seaside
village. Patrick Oxtoby, a self-conscious but
efficient young mechanic from Manchester,
starts a new job in a local garage after breaking up with his fiancé. He takes an upstairs
room in a boarding house in the grip of an
already tenuous clique, comprising two posh
young university graduates and the attractive
but recently widowed landlady. There, things
start to go excruciatingly wrong.
The first half of This Is How carefully lays out
a litany of disconnections and misplaced
desires amidst a texture of insinuating everyday malevolence. As the reader becomes
engrossed in Patrick Oxtoby’s perspective, one
can’t help but be reminded of John Egan and
Carry Me Down. The pathologies are close;
both novels are characterised by Hyland’s
first-person narration and the immediacy
of her present tense. This time, however,
through the tragic events that ensue, we are
destined to go one step further – indeed one
step deeper into the strata of Hyland’s world.
‘With this book, I couldn’t settle for two or
maybe three layers. I thought no, let’s have
more. I sent a depth charge down, and I really
sent it down.’
‘This is the kind of
stuff I feed on, these
books are catnip
to me. I’ve always
wanted to write
literary crime.’
The idea for This Is How came to Hyland
while reading Life After Life: Interviews With
Twelve Murderers, by the late English oral
historian Tony Parker. ‘It was only a three- or
four-page interview in Parker’s extraordinary
book,’ she explains. ‘It was with a man who
had served 14 years of a life sentence and was
out on licence. He describes the murder he
committed when he was in his early twenties
and it happened in a lodging house. He went
into an adjoining room and killed a man
he hardly knew, for no particular reason. It
floored me. This was in 2004 and I wrote in
my notebook that I had to write a novel based
on this story.’
Talking to Hyland, it’s clear that the composition of This is How took her way out of her
money it’s always been the case that the best
stuff – going right back to Aristotle, right to
back to Greek tragedy, to the start of what it
is that makes people enjoy reading fiction or
enjoy drama – has got to be about the guttural, the big things, people at odds with the
world. There are all sorts of gaps and breakages and faults, chasms between people, things
go wrong all the time, so much goes wrong
between people. That’s the lifeblood of my
fiction: trying to, as best as possible, express
those weaknesses in the fibre of relationships
between people. If it can’t happen in a cave
I’m not interested in it.’
Indeed, the second half of This Is How is set
for the most part in a bare prison cell, where
Hyland replaces opaque binaries of innocence
and guilt with more complex investigations
into Patrick Oxtoby’s largely somatic reactions
to his crime. ‘In prison, his life has shrunk to
a size that suits him better. And he doesn’t feel
remorse for what he’s done, he feels embarrassed. It’s a heat travelling up his body, in the
way that you suffer when you’re embarrassed,
like he’s standing in front of a fire. He says it’s
like when you leave something valuable on a
bus. That’s how he compares his experience.
The kind of: Oh fuck I wish I hadn’t done that.
His body has acted, but his mind perhaps
wasn’t fully engaged in the act. It happened
in a split second and there was a dissonance
between mind and body. I’d been reading the
fantastic debates between Sartre and MerleauPonty where, amidst all Sartre’s crapology
about ‘radical freedom’ and the like, MerleauPonty says something like, well, to put it
crudely, “Yeah but what about our fucking
bodies? How do we contend with that!”’
Hyland describes how many of her favourite
books deal in the territory of what is sometimes called ‘the gratuitous act’. 'Books like
Andre Gide’s Vatican Cellars, The Goalie's
Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke,
Crime And Punishment, and of course the obvious, Camus’s The Outsider. This is the kind of
stuff I feed on, these books are catnip to me.
I’ve always wanted to write literary crime.”
Hyland’s signature effect is to cast shadows
into places where nobody much wants to
look, to explore in fastidious detail the inner
lives of character types about whom most
people have a whole suite of generic preconceptions. These preconceptions are important
ingredients in what Kafka famously called the
‘frozen sea inside us’ and Hyland does see it as
her job to take an axe to that ice. She is very
clear when asked if there is a social justice
agenda behind what she writes. ‘There’s a
great deal I want to say, yes, but fiction can
go very wrong if an author is on a moral
campaign. It’s got to be about what happens
to people when they rub up against each
other, when they fuck each other up, and fuck
themselves up. Life is intense right? No-one
would argue with that. But first and foremost,
it has to be drama, a good story, and entertainment. God forbid, a book should be fun.’
Such a comment may seem a bit rich from
a writer who is fast becoming the laureate of
everyday damage, but the slightly perverse
fact remains that for the most part, This Is
How, while not exactly fun, is peculiarly
entertaining. Indeed, it is hard not to read the
novel fast, such is the sawn-off intensity of its
rhythms, its terse dialogue and compulsive
narrative traction.
At the end of our interview, on a hunch,
I asked Hyland whether she’d noticed the
thematic similarities between This Is How
and the first track of Eminem’s latest record,
Relapse. I’d been listening to it as I read her
book and was struck by the link. I suggested
that both works render the random brutality
of our species as an ordinary quotidian truth.
She agreed and was very pleased I’d brought it
up. She told me she often played Eminem as
a reward after a good writing session. I had to
laugh. Many writers would consider playing
Eminem a punishment rather than a reward.
But M.J. Hyland’s not just any writer.
Gregory Day is the author of The Patron
Saint of Eels (Picador, PB, $22.95)
and Roy McCoy's Sea of Diamonds
(Picador, PB, $32.95).
Also by M.J. Hyland
How the Light Gets In
Penguin. PB. $24.95
Gifted, unhappy 16-year-old
Lou Connor is desperate to
escape her life of poverty in
Sydney. But when she travels
to the US as an exchange
student, things go terribly
wrong. Every detail of Lou’s
struggle for survival with her
affluent host family is observed with dark
humour – and a defiance that veils her
longing for acceptance.
Carry Me Down
Text. PB. $23.95
John Egan lives with his
mother, father and grandmother in rural Ireland. The
Guinness Book of Records is
his favourite book and he
wants to visit Niagara Falls
with his mother. But, more
than anything, he is determined to become a world-famous lie detector,
almost at any cost. Carry Me Down explores
John's obsessive and dangerous desire to see
the truth, no matter what.
Readings is offering M.J. Hyland’s
new book This Is How (Text) for the special
price of $27.95 (normally $32.95).
Double-edged Swordplay
Book of the Month
between the
assassinations
Jo Case interviews Patrick Allington about his debut novel Figurehead (Black Inc., PB, $29.95).
Allington himself has some sympathy with
the kind of advocacy journalism epitomised
by Whittlemore (and Burchett) at his best
– though he draws the line at deliberate
deception. ‘There is a lot of journalism that
has this facade of objectivity and you don’t
have to search very hard beneath the surface
to see that objectivity is feigned or loose or at
the very least, limited ... It’s something that I
think we as readers push upon them and expect of them. But the reality is that everyone
who writes must have their own views.’
Does Allington think that all ideals are
dangerous when they’re followed too literally,
without being balanced with other considerations and looking at how the world really is?
‘Idealism is a double-edged sword. Momentum and the possibilities for positive change
come out of people pursuing new ideas and
engaging in acts of dissent that are designed
to rupture the status quo. But these things
can develop their own momentum – and
nothing works in practice as well as it might
appear to work in theory. Self-perception can
take on a more insidious perspective, where
there isn’t the ability to take a step back, to
look at the big picture critically, as well as
idealistically.’
Readings Monthly
Figurehead P A
What if you saved a man’s life and he
went on to play a leading role in oneRe
adings Monthly
of the bloodiest revolutions of our time?
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IMAGE FROM
GERMAINE GREER’S
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Ted Whittlemore, a radical Australian journalist, does just that. In the late ’s he
saves Nhem Kiry, soon to become known as
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Readings M
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Subscribe!
Adiga says that Between the Assassinations
is influenced by his reading of Balzac’s
The Human Comedy. Just as Balzac offered a portrait of the France of his day,
Adiga wanted to ‘capture the inner drives
– jealousy, lust, compassion – that shaped
the town’. (I also thought I found traces
of R.K. Narayan’s classic Malgudi Days,
onthly
M
gs
another
evocative exploration of a place
in
d
ea
R
and time through the town’s inhabitants.)
Between the Assassinations feels a little less
focused than The White Tiger, mainly
because of the structure, but is far more
revealing of Adiga’s concerns – both
political and social – about India. In these
s MonthlyAdiga invites us, time and again,
stories
ng
di
ea
R
into the lives of the people who make up
the majority of India’s population, giving
us glimpses into their dreams, even as
those aspirations recede before us.
OF HELEN
Nhem Kiry, who becomes ‘the acceptable face
9/52).$%0%
A cycle-cart puller rails against his
exploitative employer, his ungrateful
customers, and ultimately his fellow
cart-pullers, who suffer the abuse and still
return day after day to be underpaid and
ill-used. A schoolteacher who had dreams
of becoming a poet puts his ambitions
into his prodigy, only to be betrayed
when the boy joins in the mischief of the
school’s bad boys. The eighth daughter
in a Brahmin family who can’t afford her
dowry is sent as a servant from house to
house, seeking a place where she will be
valued. And my favourite, Xerox, the
pavement bookseller who sells illegally
photocopied books at discounted prices,
mounts a protest against censorship by
insisting on selling counterfeit copies of
Salman Rushdie’s banned Satanic Verses,
even after he is beaten up by the police.
He believes that journalists who are granted
the freedom to push an argument are in some
ways both more truthful – and able to delve
deeper into the issues they explore. ‘It doesn’t
become a matter of taking the fixed facts
in a story and considering them to be facts
that we’ve all learned, but rather, engaging
directly with the journalist and forming our
own views about whether we agree with what
they’re saying. Ultimately, that’s a much more
productive way of collectively getting our
heads around issues. And a lot more realistic.
Because we know that we don’t all agree on
things. And the idea that we need to is itself a
little bit ludicrous.’
STILL B
Y STEV
EN
Allington is careful to point out that he uses
these historical events and people (‘fictional
creations’) as a starting point to tell a story
and explore his central ideas, rather than
the other way round. Readers curious about
Pol Pot’s Cambodia, its aftermath and the
Cold War politics of the 1960s and 1970s
will still find plenty of historical detail to
That kind of self-delusion is a strong theme
throughout. The main characters have idealised versions of themselves that uneasily contrast with reality. Khiry and Whittlemore have
inflated ideas of their own importance on the
world stage, married with heightened ideas
about their responsibilities to world affairs
– and the necessary compromises they feel
licensed to make in order to influence world
events in ways they see as positive. Allington
was keen to explore ‘that sense of the disconnect between an individual’s ideals and how
they imagine the world might work – and
what their impact on the world might be’.
Between the Assassinations is the novel
Adiga was working on before The White
Tiger and is, once again, concerned with
the inequalities and inadequacies in
Indian society – and particularly the class
system that resolutely keeps the lower
classes trapped. The setting is the fictional
city of Kittur, based loosely on Adiga’s
hometown of Mangalore, in India’s south.
The assassinations of Indira Gandhi
in 1984 and her son Rajiv seven years
later are the bookends to the seven days
spanned in this collection of interwoven
short stories. Adiga takes us through the
lives of Kittur’s various inhabitants, examining the social hierarchies and politics
in the town through their eyes, exposing
the dynamics that are mirrored in the rest
of India.
FROM COVER
The two main characters borrow liberally
from real-life historical counterparts who
Allington used as ‘starting templates’. Nhem
Kiry was inspired by Pol Pot’s right-hand
man, Khieu Samphan; Ted Whittlemore by
controversial Australian journalist Wilfred
Burchett, often accused of being a Communist ‘agent of influence’. Other historical
characters, like Sihanouk, Henry Kissinger,
Pol Pot and Fidel Castro are similarly drawn
from the historical record, but fleshed out
with positively gleeful fictional licence.
Allington made ‘extensive use’ of Wilfred
Burchett’s life and writings in creating Ted
Whittlemore. He was particularly interested
in the ongoing ‘passionate’ debate about
whether Burchett (who, like Whittlemore,
was a committed socialist and reported from
the North Vietnamese side of the war) was
a journalist, an agent of influence or both.
This question is teased out in the character of
Whittlemore, who we see actively participating in world events – like saving Khiry, an act
he bitterly regrets later, and playing matchmaker between Sihanouk and the Khmer
Rouge – and doctoring his columns to serve
his view of those events. ‘He’s partly of the
view that the whole world is peddling their
own perspective and having it masquerade as
truth and that it’s important to do that for all
sides. He’s got a view of history and of day-today current affairs that gives him justification
in his own mind for this approach and allows
him to see himself as a legitimate journalist.
As far as he sees it, he’s not doing anything
different to anyone else, he’s just coming at it
from a different angle.’
Figurehead is mostly set in the years leading
up to the Pol Pot regime (1975-79) and the
years that follow, with very sparse reflections
on the four years that represent ‘one of the
most truly horrific regimes of the century’.
The absence of those years is especially chilling – what the reader imagines took place
is more effective than any necessarily brief
telling could be. ‘It’s a representation, I guess,
of what happened in the West in terms of
what people imagined was happening in
Cambodia. There was a great silence and
almost a blanket over Cambodia during that
time ... It wasn’t really until early 1979, when
the Vietnamese invaded, that the full extent
of the horrors became known to the general
public. I wanted to convey something of that
– of not knowing, but also of us being more
collectively at ease with not knowing.’
W.H. CHONG
Figurehead is a tightly crafted, sharply satirical
novel about questions of culpability, responsibility and idealism as played out in Pol Pot’s
Cambodia and the decades that followed.
Australian journalist Ted Whittlemore is
famous for reporting on the war in Vietnam
from the side of the North Vietnamese. In the
late 1960s, he lives in Phnom Penh, where he
is friendly with both the Communist insurgents (who will become the Khmer Rouge)
and Cambodian leader Prince Sihanouk. In
1967, he saves the life of future Khmer Rouge
leader Nhem Kiry, later to become Pol Pot’s
right-hand man. The novel follows the machinations and trajectories of both Whittlemore
and Khiry, two flawed idealists who both
influence and are influenced by history.
‘I was interested in the passage of time and
the way that moments in history and particular decisions and particular events have
reverberating effects in the years and decades
that follow,’ says Allington.
Atlantic. PB. $32.95
Aravind Adiga’s first
novel, The White Tiger,
sensationally won the
Man Booker Prize last
year, against more
established writers such as
Salman Rushdie,
Sebastian Barry and
Amitav Ghosh. A groundbreaking work
(in my opinion), it was written in the
voice of Balram Halwai, an entrepreneurial man who moves up in the world
through hard work and honesty, fighting
a society that seems to be always working
against him, exploiting him, until he
decides committing a murder is the only
way to break the cycle. The novel explores
the plight of India’s poor and an indifferent system that disallows social and
material advancement, all narrated in
Halwai’s scathing, irreverent and often
humorous voice.
of the Khmer Rouge’ after the collapse of the
regime, is ‘ideology in its purest form gone
horribly wrong’, says Allington. In our earliest
encounter with Khiry, his ‘mouth turn[s] dry’
at the thought of the Cambodian military
beating the peasants. Post-1975, he coolly
reflects on the importance of grooming and
manners on the world stage: ‘You can’t leave
anything to chance ... when you’re selling a
million and a half dead people.’
IMAGE BY
Not many first-time novelists can boast a
Nobel Prize winner as a mentor. But then
again, Patrick Allington – who was mentored
by J.M. Coetzee in the early stages of writing
Figurehead – has not written your average
debut novel. Instead of the fairly routine
practice of drawing on life experience for his
first outing, this writer has drawn on history,
creating what he calls ‘an absurdist version’.
enlighten and entertain. Allington may wear
his knowledge about the period and its main
players lightly, and have a great deal of fun
with the facts, but the book – which took
approximately four years to write – is steeped
in evocative detail and sharply telling observations that obviously stem from a rigorous
grounding in the subject. His unconventional, yet successful, approach calls to mind
the adage about knowing the rules in order to
break them.
Aravind Adiga
re Room >>
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Spa
rner on The
re inside >>
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releases. Mo
k, CD
April boo
& DVD new
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Daniel Lanois
$25.95
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The Enchantre
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Tell You
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Our Days
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iJacaris de
Spanish
18th Century
Guitar Music
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Hiroshima
Mon Amour
Kabita Dhara will be undertaking an
Asialink residency in India this year to
explore possible relationships between the
Indian and Australian publishing industries.
Isabel Allende
$29.95
>> p25
ts inside >>
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Salman Rushdie
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>> p8
Hanif Kureshi
$32.95
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DON WATSO
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AT READIN
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>> p15
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9681 9255
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NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK
THE
PAGES
RRP $23.95
The first novel from
MURRAY
BAIL
since the multiple
award-winner
Eucalyptus
‘The most extraordinary piece
of fiction published in this
country this year.’
Monthly
‘Oblique, demanding,
intelligent…The spell is most
powerfully cast in the brilliant
quiet skill of the writing,
which can make the world
come alive on the page.’
Guardian
‘A wonderful book.’
Age
New Books Fiction
Australian Fiction
The Book of Rapture
Nikki Gemmell
Fourth Estate. PB. $29.99
After gaining notoriety for
her no-holds-barred depiction of female sexuality in
The Bride Stripped Bare,
Nikki Gemmell chooses
religion and science as her
subjects in her latest offering,
The Book of Rapture. Set at an
unspecified time in the future, Gemmell
imagines a world where science has ascended
to a God-like role in society and chaos is let
loose. The story centres on three young
children held captive in a hotel room,
narrated through the eyes of their scientist
mother, who may or may not have fallen
prey to the evils of power and corruption.
Punctuated by mantras from Buddhism to
Islamism, Gemmell’s novel debates the role
of scientific advancement in an increasingly
secular society and the resulting effects
stemming from an abuse of this power. But
at the heart of Gemmell’s novel is the
exploration of maternal love and responsibility, something she elaborates on more in The
Book of Rapture than her previous novel.
Gemmell’s latest work will no doubt cement
her reputation as a fearless writer unafraid to
broach taboo subjects.
Emily Laidlaw is a freelance reviewer
Wake in Fright
Kenneth Cook
Text. PB. $23.95
Earlier this year, Text
successfully resurrected a
long-forgotten modern
Australian classic with
Madeleine St John’s Women
in Black. Now, they’re at it
again. Wake in Fright comes
with an introduction by Peter
Temple, an afterword by David Stratton and
praise from literary luminaries such as J.M.
Coetzee (‘a true dark classic of Australian
literature’); M.J. Hyland (‘gripping from the
first page to the last’); Robert Drewe (‘the
Outback without the sentimental bulldust’);
and Thomas Keneally (‘a classic of the ugly
side of Menzies’ Australia’). And the
resurrection of the book is cleverly timed to
coincide with the re-release of the film
adaptation, a cinematic classic thought to
have lost forever, returned to the big screen
this year. Reviewing the book 40 years ago,
The New York Times wrote: ‘In the town of
Bundanyabba, a young schoolmaster
discovers gambling, ruins himself financially,
then plunges headlong toward his own
destruction in many other ways, alcoholic,
sexual and spiritual—and yet, somehow
throughout this five-day nightmare there
persists a note of hope in man’s incredible
resilience. Cook writes astonishingly well,
with a fierce economy and a frightening
power of visualization.’
We Don’t Live
Here Anymore
Matt Nable
RRP $23.95
Winner of the Miles Franklin Award
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
www.textpublishing.com.au
Viking. PB. $32.95
Charlie Hudson’s family have
been taking summer holidays
in Parker’s Head for as long
as he can remember. But the
year he turns 15, his life is
changed forever. When he is
beaten up by a couple of
local hoods, the beautiful,
ambitious Tess Bailey steps in to save him.
While Tess tells him of her dreams to move
to Sydney, Charlie falls in love with her
smile; a promise of happiness that remains
with him for the rest of his life. Sadness and
pain simmer under the surface of this pleasant
holiday town: a father tries to bury his
homosexuality; a wife sinks a terrible memory
in an alcoholic haze; a young girl struggles
with bulimia; a young man finally beats back
his abusive and alcoholic father. But there are
also dreams and hopes for a better future –
and time slowly reveals just where these
desires will lead. Moving between the
long-past summer and the present, where
dreams struggle against life’s harsh realities,
the story follows the lives of those in Charlie’s
family, friends and other locals who are
inextricably linked with Parker’s Head and the
shocking end to that fateful summer.
Michelle Calligaro is from Readings Carlton
The True Story
of Butterfish
Nick Earls
Vintage. PB. Normally $32.95
Our special price $27.95
Nick Earls seems to be the
designated story teller for
Australia’s forgotten men.
Since the debut of 28-year-old
Richard Derrington in Zigzag
Street, Earls has explored the
lives of urban males in
various states of personal and
emotional chaos. The True Story of Butterfish
continues in this tradition, but with some
notable changes in style and tone. Curtis
Holland is a burnt-out rock star in his
mid-thirties. He’s back in Brisbane, hoping
to recover while producing albums in his
backyard studio. He hadn’t counted on his
neighbours, however, and is particularly torn
by 16-year-old Annaliese Winter, a confusing
mix of sexually awake adult and doting
teenager. In Curtis, Earls has created a wiser,
more fleshed-out character than in his earlier
works. This leads to less laughs but greater
emotional resonance. Notions of age and
responsibility are explored, and for the most
part it is Curtis who must do the right thing,
while all around him are floundering in a state
of arrested development. Here, Nick Earls has
tightened his focus and widened his emotional
range, and for that he is to be commended.
Laurie Steed is a freelance reviewer
The Ice Age
Kirsten Reed
Text. PB. $27.95
This ethereal debut has been
compared to Lolita and On
the Road. Certainly, the
beautiful teenage narrator,
zig-zagging the vast interior of
the US with an enigmatic,
much-older companion,
seems a fantasy Lolita. She is
eager for experience and hungry for love, the
puppy dog seducer in her undefined relationship with reluctant ‘reformed hedonist’
Gunther. ‘Guys just can’t resist the advances
of us young chicks, I’m told,’ she observes
hopefully. This is a story about loss of
innocence, ambiguously portrayed. There’s an
Alice in Wonderland quality to the narrator’s
journey through a sinister small-town
America populated by oddly menacing
average Americans and a string of likeable
eccentrics (Gunther’s friends). The fine line
she treads between the childhood she is
exiting and the newly strange adult world
gifts her with a curious perspective: an
Alice-like blend of naivety and knowingness.
‘When I’m older, if I’m anything like the rest
of them, I’ll have lost the ability to understand anything.’ The narrator both loses and
gains from her accumulated experience,
becoming more wary and knowing as a result
of her many mishaps, but accruing friendship
and a growing hoard of knowledge, too.
Atmospheric and intriguing.
Jo Case is Editor of Readings Monthly
The River Wife
Heather Rose
A&U. HB. $24.99
This book is infused with the feeling of a day
spent watching the river. It is tender, unhurried and gentle. Told by the part-woman/
part-fish character of the river wife, this tale
finds beauty everywhere. It is a story of love:
the river wife’s love for family, for her world
and for something strange that combines
the two – Wilson James. He has come to
her river to escape the loneliness and grief
he feels after the death of his son. At first,
he is unaware of the river wife, but soon
the boundaries of their two worlds begin to
collapse and a deep love that is new to both
of them emerges. The river wife marvels at
the complexity of human emotions, charged
as they are with the knowledge of their own
brief lifespan. Wilson James is overawed
with the life surrounding the river and the
mystery of the woman who tends to it. And
slowly their two lives become irrevocably
intertwined. The River Wife holds stories
within stories and they are all woven together with a compassionate and unique hand.
S.W. Rafael is a freelance reviewer
International Fiction
We Are All
Made of Glue
Marina Lewycka
Fig Tree. PB. $32.95
Another sharp, funny novel
from the author of A Short
History of Tractors in
Ukranian. Georgie Sinclair's
husband has walked out;
her 16-year-old son is busy
surfing born-again websites;
and all those overdue articles
for Adhesives in the Modern World are getting
her down. When Georgie spots Mrs Shapiro,
an eccentric old Jewish émigré neighbour
with a fondness for matchmaking, rummaging through her skip in the middle of
the night, it's just the distraction she needs.
Soon, a firm friendship is formed over the
reduced-price shelf at the supermarket. Then
Mrs Shapiro is admitted to hospital and to
Georgie's surprise, she is named as her next
of kin. But sorting out Mrs Shapiro's semiderelict mansion in Highbury is no easy job
when the handyman called in to change the
locks turns out to be not what he seems and
his two assistants are doing more breaking
than fixing. And what about the two slimy
estate agents who start competing to trick
Mrs Shapiro into selling her rickety old
house, or the social worker determined to
commit her to a nursing home? Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
This brick of a book comes
with a royal family tree and
two-page cast of characters,
but don’t expect a standard
historical blockbuster from
Hilary Mantel. Whilst Wolf
Hall revisits very thoroughly
explored Tudor territory,
traditional villain Thomas Cromwell is
Mantel’s hero of choice. The son of a
blacksmith, Cromwell was Cardinal Wolsey’s
right hand man, then chief legal head-kicker
for Henry VIII. He survives a brutal
childhood to become an international jack
of all trades and staunch family man: secular,
intelligent and powerfully ambitious. His
sleekness is in contrast to a dishevelled,
emotionally and spiritually brutal Thomas
More. At court, Anne Boleyn calculates her
career while a pale Jane Seymour watches
from the shadows. No heaving bosoms here.
The whole book is about the acquisition and
loss of power: of present and future
queens, the monarchy and the church.
The true winners are the financial centres
of Europe. Mantel’s writing is so good it
demands frequent pauses for re-reading. Her
bone dry character observations are often very
funny, and she handles a mass of historical detail lightly but with absolute conviction. Wolf
Hall doesn’t provide any surprise endings, but
it is a supremely enjoyable journey.
Vicky Booth is Program Administrator
of CAE Book Groups
My Father’s Tears
and Other Stories
John Updike
Hamish Hamilton. PB. $32.95
This accomplished collection
represents the last ever
publication from the
ever-prolific John Updike.
Completed and scheduled for
publication before his death
earlier this year, My Father’s
Tears is classic Updike. In
many of these beautiful, moving stories, he
revisits the haunts of his childhood from the
vantage point of old age. Witty and devastatingly observant as always, this is a collection
that will long be admitted and cherished.
The City and the City
China Mieville
Macmillan. PB. $34.99
China Mieville writes science
fiction in the same way that
George Orwell did – or in the
way Raymond Chandler
wrote crime fiction. In other
words, it transcends its genre
to become a plain good read.
In this eerie new novel, he
borrows from the police procedural and adds
a dash of political intrigue. The city of Beszel
is shadowed by another city that exists in the
same physical space, but in another dimension, where the citizens of each are schooled
in pretending the other doesn’t exist. When a
murdered woman is found, her death seems
to be caught up in illegal activity between the
cities – and a conspiracy far stranger and
more deadly than Inspector Tyador Borlú
could have imagined. ‘A fine, page-turning
murder investigation in the tradition of Philip
K Dick, gradually opening up to become
something bigger and more significant than
we originally suspected.’ – Guardian
Cockroach
Rawi Hage
Hamish Hamilton. PB. $32.95
Cockroach, Ravi Hage’s second
book, following on from the
award-winning De Niro’s
Game, is the story of an exiled
immigrant. An unnamed
protagonist lives in Montreal
and has been ordered to seek
psychiatric help after an
unsuccessful suicide. His concerns are
rudimentary: hunger, desire, survival,
retribution and escape. At first, we track his
attempt to revitalise his existence. A sense of
entitlement and a keen awareness of his own
deprivation drive him forward, as he pursues
an Iranian lover and indulges his kleptomaniacal urges. He is ruled by a duality: on one
hand, a formless rage at the society that has
marginalised him, and on the other, an
entrenched self-loathing, which manifests in a
fantasy of metamorphosis from man to
cockroach. There is something feverishly
disturbed and hard-hearted in his voice – a
black-hole at the narrative’s centre that can be
neither seen nor ignored as the reader
gravitates toward it. As the plot progresses,
Hage reaches back further into our antihero’s
past, while in Montreal a chance for redemption is presented. Hage is a grand stylist; he
has created an original and bleakly luminous
novel on loss, despair and insecthood.
William Hueston-Heyward is from
Readings St Kilda
The Sealed Letter
Sacred Hearts
Scribe. PB. $35
Virago. PB. $32.95
The convent of Santa Caterina, in sixteenthcentury Ferrara, is more than a place for
women with a religious vocation; it is a convenient repository for noblewomen whose
families cannot afford to provide them with
a dowry and a husband. When Seraphina,
a 16-year-old girl from a noble family in
Milan, arrives at the convent, her protests
could not be more vehement. The abbess has
been assured by her family that they consider
Ferrara a better place for their daughter than
Milan. The reason for this belief soon emerges: a thwarted love affair with a singer whom
Seraphina’s parents considered beneath her.
But far from being subdued and distracted
from her loss, from within the confines of
the convent, Seraphina begins dreaming of
rebellion and escape.
Judith Loriente is a friend of Readings
Emma Donoghue
In London in 1864, Emily
‘Fido’ Faithfull is busy
running a feminist printing
press, and trying to improve
the lot of the women of her
age. Their injustices are
brought forcefully home
when she runs into an old
friend, Helen Codrington. Helen’s marriage
to an army officer is at breaking point, yet
she is tied to him for life, and unable to
marry Colonel Anderson, another officer
who is madly in love with her. Fido offers
Helen sympathy and friendship – but to her
horror, quickly discovers she has unwittingly
become an accomplice in Helen and
Anderson’s affair. The resultant divorce case
– based on a real-life one – exposes the
sordid but fascinating world of private
detection brought into being by the 1857
Matrimonial Causes Act, which allowed men
to divorce their wives for adultery, provided
they could obtain proof that would satisfy a
jury. And like the Victorian sensation novels
of Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary
Braddon for which Fido has a predilection,
it’s an unputdownable read, with one
outrageous twist after the next.
Judith Loriente is a friend of Readings
As the Earth Turns to
Silver
Alison Wong
Picador. PB. $32.99
This fascinating novel follows
the intertwined stories of two
very different people
struggling with the trials of
daily life in early twentiethcentury Wellington, New
Zealand. Chung Yung,
recently arrived from China,
helps his older brother at their greengrocery
in order to support his family back in China.
At the same time, he must deal with overt
racism in his new homeland and his growing
affection for a local widow, Katherine
McKechnie – herself struggling to raise two
young children after the untimely (if not
entirely unwelcome) death of her brutish
husband. Against the backdrop of World
War I, there is inevitable tragedy; however,
this novel is ultimately very uplifting. Had
the publisher’s blurb not mentioned it, I
would not have guessed that this was a first
novel; the unfolding of plot and the
development of interesting characters are
both handled with the most assured skill.
Such thorny issues as racism, women’s
suffrage and class are also handled with a
deft touch. I, for one, am very much looking
forward to Alison Wong’s next literary
endeavour.
Simon Auld is a friend of Readings
The Tricking of Freya
Christina Sunley
HarperCollins. PB. $27.99
Freya Morris journeys back
into the dramatic events of
her childhood as she unravels
a family secret and tells her
cousin her family’s story. Freya grows up in
suburban America. Each
summer she escapes to
Gimli, a small village on Lake Winnipeg in
Manitoba, Canada. Gimli or ‘New Iceland’
is home to Freya’s extended family, including
her troubled Aunt Birdie who wants Freya to
learn the language and mythology of
Iceland. The landscape, language, history,
and mythology of Iceland are woven
throughout this debut novel. The Tricking of
Freya tells a compelling story that touches on
mental illness, being caught between old and
new worlds, and how the past, our own and
our ancestors, shapes the present.
Samarra Hyde is Program Manager
for CAE Book Groups
Sarah Dunant
The Complete
Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino
Allen Lane. HB. $45
This is the first complete
edition of Italo Calvino’s
comic stories of the strangeness of the universe, and
includes seven stories never
before available in English.
These stories are funny,
imaginative, beautifully
written and unforgettable. ‘If anyone ever
tells you that science takes all the poetry out
of creation, hand them Calvino’s book. It
makes the argument that there is no corner
of the cosmos that cannot be enlightened by
human imagination, that even black holes
can have wit.’ – Guardian
Poetry
Villian
Justin Clemens
Hunter Publishing. PB. $19.95
Justin Clemens invokes the
spirit of infamous French
poet, vagabond and thief
François Villon, through his
bold, contemporary translation of Villon’s ballads – but
also in his own new work,
ranging from the violent and
obscene to the lyrical and sublime, sometimes within a single verse. ‘The meeting of
Villon and Clemens is one of true minds.
These are snaky, savage poems, charged with
an electric intelligence.’ — Chloe Hooper
History of the Day
Stephen Edgar
Black Pepper. PB. $24.95
Stephen Edgar is acknowledged as one of
the most elegant and technically astonishing
poets currently writing. The poems in History of the Day have an imaginative reach, a
grandeur and sweep that lead us through the
transfiguring intensities of love to the burdens of loss, grief and horror. Edgar engages
language at the highest, most sophisticated
level.
Journals
Etchings 7:
Chameleons
PB. $28.95
This Adelaide-based literary journal features
a real coup in their seventh edition – an interview with notoriously publicity-shy Nobel
Laureate J.M. Coetzee about his next novel,
Summertime. Also includes new fiction from
Sallie Muirden and others, new poetry from
Mark O’Flynn, Geoff Lemon and more, essays, art and photography.
Q&A with Kirsten Reed
Your novel has drawn
comparisons to Lolita and
On the Road, among
other works. Were either of
these novels – particularly
Lolita – direct influences
on The Ice Age?
Not directly, though I have read On
the Road and Lolita (when I was around
Lolita’s age). It didn’t occur to me until
I finished writing and starting pitching
The Ice Age to publishers that I’d written
a sort of reverse Lolita.
The narrator, an adolescent precariously
treading the line between childhood and
adulthood, offers a unique perspective on
the adult world she observes, her distance
alternately gifting her with knowing and
handicapping her with naivety. Were you
particularly drawn to this stage of life,
and the perspective it offers?
Yes, I chose an adolescent viewpoint
specifically for its clarity and limitations.
I wanted the reader to be able to peer
through her naive take and see more
than she does at times, but also benefit
from her blunt observations, that are free
of the compromises and existential clutter that we accumulate as we grow older.
The character of Gunther, the narrator’s
much older travelling companion, is a
wonderful enigma. Was he fun to create?
I loved writing the character of Gunther.
He is so secretive and dignified that even
as the person creating his character, I felt
I should keep a respectful distance. He
was initially inspired by my boyfriend,
specifically the part of him that is an old
soul, and by my unhealthy vampire fixation and sense of nostalgia. From there
I let my imagination wander. This book
was written in such a stream-of-consciousness manner that it is hard for me
to pinpoint where much of it originated.
The background of the teenage narrator
seems deliberately vague – she’s from smalltown America and hungry for adventure,
she doesn’t make friends her own age easily,
but that’s all we’re really told about her.
There are plenty of gaps for the reader to
fill in. What was the thinking behind that?
I aimed to create the kind of characters
that would be encountered travelling.
We don’t know everything about people
we meet. We don’t even know everything
about ourselves. Leaving a sense of mystery
intact made the characters feel more real to
me as I wrote them. I wanted the reader
to feel the same sense of wonder they’d feel
toward another person. Also, I didn’t want
her to reveal more than I felt she realistically
would. When I was her age, I didn’t share
anything I didn’t want to, and her character
is loosely based on a younger me.
Like all road novels, The Ice Age is about
a metaphorical journey of transformation
as much as a physical one. It seems to be
very much about loss of innocence and
the passage from naivety to knowing; both
celebrating and mourning that journey.
How do you see the narrator’s journey?
I told this story with mixed feelings;
celebrating and mourning that journey
is a perfect way to put it. I was at time
of questioning in my life, wondering
whether I had lamely relinquished my
dreams and aspirations, or whether I was
naive to have entertained them in the first
place. The book explores this quandary.
The narrator is driven by intense longing;
needing and wanting things from the
world, and the people around her, and is
hopelessly in love. I wanted to show this
state for what it is: open to both good
and bad experiences, full of passion and
vulnerability.
New Crime Fiction Dead Write with Kate O'Mara
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Dark Mirror
Barry Maitland
A&U. PB. $32.99
Despite its contemporary
setting, the premise of
Maitland’s latest sounds
thoroughly Victorian – a
beautiful, learned young
woman succumbs painfully to
arsenic in the London Library,
leaving behind several friends,
relatives and acquaintances, all with something to possibly gain from her death. The
victim led a complicated, secretive life, and
DI Kolla and DCI Brock find themselves
chasing up all manner of strange leads. Not
the least of them is the question of how one
procures a fatal quantity of arsenic in
twenty-first-century London. A complex and
satisfying tale with enough scarlet herrings
and intriguing bit players to keep the pages
turning well into the night.
Kate O’Mara is from Readings Carlton
The Dark Vineyard
Martin Walker
Quercus. PB. Normally $29.95
A few months ago, when Walker’s crime
debut Bruno, Chief of Police was reviewed
in these pages, I hoped the formerly sleepy
St Denis would become a hotbed of death
and intrigue so we could hear more from
the charming Bruno. Well, the food-loving
hamlet now finds itself in the sights of a
multinational wine conglomerate wanting to
buy up residents’ land for a shiny, modern
vineyard. The mayor thinks it will bring
more jobs and tourism, but Bruno smells a
rat – and following a vicious arson attack,
unwanted attention from a radical environmental group and the tragic and mysterious
deaths of two much-loved local residents, he
sadly realises he may be right. KO
Fear the Worst
Black Ice
Orion. PB. $32.99
What do you do when you go
to pick your teenage daughter
up from her summer job only
to find that, not only is she
missing, but no one there will
admit to even seeing her?
Then, after you've reported her
missing, the police seem more
intent on pinning her murder on you than
actually looking for her? You look yourself. You
fall for scams, fly through three states on the
premise of a blurry photo, uncover some
interesting ‘facts’ about your daughter’s new
step-family, and risk the life of yourself and
anyone around you to desperately make sure
she doesn't become a statistic. I didn’t have one
dull train ride to work while I was reading this.
Dani Solomon is from Readings Carlton
Bantam. PB. Normally $32.95
Giarratano’s third novel sees Detective Jill
Jackson working undercover in one of Sydney’s less desirable suburbs, dealing with her
high-class addict sister and equally high-class
dealer/lawyer boyfriend who, incidentally,
has a recently paroled mother-of-one after
him, hell-bent on revenge. It’s a lot to take
in, but there’s never a dull moment! There
are so many twists and turns, you’ll find
yourself wondering how the author will tie
it all up – but she does, and the reader is
rewarded with one of the most satisfying
conclusions of any book I’ve read. DS
Linwood Barclay
The Ignorance
of Blood
Robert Wilson
Wilson has been turning out
wonderful novels for years,
and won the CWA Gold
Dagger in 1999 for A Small
Death in Lisbon. Yet, for
whatever reason, he’s always
flown just under the radar in
Australia. Hopefully this
sprawling, yet tightly plotted thriller – the last
in his excellent Javier Falcon quartet – will
finally be the breakthrough. Starting with a
freak car accident on a Seville Highway
involving a turncoat Russian mafia heavy and
a suitcase full of Euros, this book has it all –
terrorism, kidnapping, drug dealing, prostitution, human trafficking and explosive
violence. It’s a fitting finale to Falcon, and if
you enjoy this you really must explore the
others – all top notch indeed. KO
Leah Giarratano
Shelley’s Heart
Charles McCarry
Scribe. PB. $35
First published in 1995, McCarry’s gargantuan political thriller finally gets an Australian
release. Franklin Mallory, former conservative US president, has just been defeated at
the polls – but has proof of vote-tampering,
and believes himself the rightful winner. He’s
also heard rumours that President ‘Frosty’
Lockwood, a laconic liberal about to enter
his second term, ordered the assassination of
an Arabic terrorist. What follows is a dazzling
array of life or death power plays and uneasy
strategic alliances that propel this believable
book to its nerve-wracking conclusion. KO
THE Beast of
the Camargue
Xavier-Marie Bonnot
MacLehose Press. PB. Normally $32.95
Every year in Tarascon, as they have done
for centuries, the Knights of the Tarasque
worship the effigy of a mythical beast. But
the boundaries between myth and reality are
blurred when a mutilated body is found at
New Books Non-fiction
Biography
The Lost Mother
Anne Summers
MUP. PB. $34.99
When I was younger, Anne
changed my perception of
the world with her wonderful Damned Whores and
God’s Police. Now, 25 years
later, I put my daughter to
bed and pick up her latest
offering. Here, Anne begins
to determine the origin of a portrait of her
own mother from the stance of the painter,
the owners, and consequently of herself and
her mother. It is a journey full of complexity and pain for all involved, told with
honesty and regard for the women within
the story. The Lost Mother brings into the
light the history of Melbourne from the
1930s to now – and the role of female
artists (in particular Constance Stokes, the
artist of the portrait) and social identities in
shaping our cultural landscape. But most of
all, Summers explores the choices women
make between parenthood, creativity and
love. I read through the night and marvel
again that one writer could fit so much of
herself and of us all into one beautifully
presented book. I finish and step a little
closer to understanding how choices also
involve sacrifice.
Chris Gordon is Events Coordinator
at Readings
Blood-Dark Track
Joseph O’Neill
Harper. PB. $24.99
The acclaimed author of
Netherland investigates his
family’s past in this ruthlessly
honest memoir of sorts.
Both his grandfathers were
imprisoned during World
War II. His Irish grandfather, an active IRA member,
was interred as part of a wartime sweep of
IRA officers by the British. His Turkish
grandfather, a glamorous hotelier, was also
imprisoned by the British, on a trip to Palestine – and accused of being a German spy.
‘An enormously intelligent plunge into the
World War II era that involves, among other
elements, an unsolved 65-year-old murder,
a rusted pistol, clandestine train travel and
assignations in the dark.’ – New York Times
Charles Dickens:
The Making of
a Literary Giant
Christopher Hibbert
Palgrave. PB. $39.95
With passion and wit, Christopher Hibbert details the crucial years that formed
Dickens the writer and the man. He explains
how Dickens transferred the smallest
fragments of his experience to his fiction,
and how he interpreted his youth for both
himself and his readers. An illuminating
look at a complex and baffling person.
In the Sanctuary
of Outcasts
Neil White
Pier 9. PB. Normally $32.95
In the Sanctuary of Outcasts
is a most unusual story. Neil
White was a magazine editor
who’d been focussed on
success and its trappings his
whole life. Rather than let
his investors know the true
financial state of his
magazine, he began ‘kiting’ – illegally
depositing and drawing cheques between
two accounts at separate banks. When he
was discovered, he was sentenced to 18
months imprisonment at Carville, Louisiana. Carville turns out to be the USA’s
national leprosarium. White is horrified to
find the facility still contains 130 sufferers
of the disease, in addition to 500 prison
inmates. At first he is reluctant to even
draw breath in proximity to the victims of
the disease, afraid he will catch it. But over
time, his work duties in the cafeteria bring
him into contact with these enigmatic
people who have overcome adversity and
enjoy Carville as their home. White is then
able to look beyond their disfigurement,
which in turns forces him to question the
values and beliefs that have led to this point
in his life and separated him from his
beloved family.
Annie Condon is a freelance reviewer
the foot of the effigy, apparently torn apart
by gigantic teeth and claws. Michel de Palma
from the Marseille murder squad is given the
case, and the mystery he unravels stretches
back to the time of the German occupation
and beyond. But one dark secret eludes him.
Can it really be that a terrifying monster stalks
the bleak marshes of the Camargue?
IN BRIEF
A maladjusted teenager,
bullied on a popular blog,
seeks vengeance in Jeffery
Deaver’s Roadside Crosses
(Hodder & Stoughton, PB,
$32.99), which serves as a
timely warning for those who
post too much personal
information on the internet! Robyn Adair
takes the reader back to a murky, 1920s
Sydney in Death and the Running Patterer
(Michael Joseph, PB, $29.95), while Alex
Palmer’s Labyrinth of Drowning (HarperCollins, PB, $32.99) features Sydney in its
modern incarnation. Glass Key winner Haken
Nesser’s Woman with Birthmark (Macmillan,
PB, $32.99), published in Sweden in the
1996, gets a local release this month and
Walter Mosley kisses Easy Rawlins goodbye
and welcomes private dick Leonard McGill in
The Long Fall (Weidenfeld, PB, $32.99) the
first in his new series set in modern day New
York. Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder
(Piatkus, PB, $22.99) is also the first in a new
series, each one set in a different part of Asia
and featuring the roving, rotund Singh. PI
Vish Puri, another portly fellow, must solve a
curious murder in Tarquin Hall’s Case of the
Missing Servant (Hutchinson, PB, $32.95).
Finally, former drug smuggler Andrea Mohr’s
jailhouse memoir Pixie: Inside a World of
Drugs, Sex and Violence (Hardie Grant, PB,
$32.95) promises a no-holds-barred account
of the Australian prison system and those who
are at its mercy. KO
Cooking with Baz
Sean Dooley
A&U. PB. $27.99
Sean Dooley’s father Baz is
your typical Aussie larrikin
who loves his pub, his
mates, his meat and, when
he finally returns home
many hours later to a cold
meal, his family. Part
autobiography, part memoir,
this book is an amusing look back at
Australian suburban life in the seventies
and eighties with an artistic mother married
to a loud-mouthed bookmaker from the
wrong side of the tracks. Sean works with
his father as a bookie to pay his way
through university but chooses bird-watching and literature over interminable
drinking and yarn sessions at the bar.
Among the smiles this memoir evokes is the
unconditional love shown by Baz towards
Di when she is dying from her second bout
of cancer. Emaciated, bedridden, in pain
and having no appetite, Baz goes to
extraordinary lengths to tempt her palate
with an array of his deliciously homecooked meals. It is during these heartwrenching times that Baz and Sean
reconnect and discover the glories in the
common ground they thought they’d lost.
Kath Lockett is a freelance reviewer
Sean Dooley was a Readings Glenfern Fellow
Raising My Voice
Malalai Joya
Macmillan. PB. $34.99
We often hear about Afghan women. We
don’t often hear from them. Here, Malalai
Joya, who at 25 years old was the youngest
woman ever elected to the Afghan parliament, passionately reveals the complexity of
contemporary Afghan politics through her
own extraordinary experience. In her first address to the parliament, she denounced many
of her fellow parliamentarians for crimes
against humanity committed throughout the
jihadi and Taliban eras. Many perpetrators of
atrocities (from rape to torture to mutilation
and massacres) now sit in parliament. Joya
believes that without justice for these war
crimes, the country will always be unsafe and
corrupt. She was suspended from parliament,
has received many death threats and travels
with bodyguards, but she continues to speak
of her hope that the trauma Afghans live with
will be acknowledged, and that the men who
authorised and committed these crimes will
meet justice. Her bravery is breathtaking and
inspirational. She is proud of her country and
her history, but she is unafraid to highlight its
black spots of despair and violence. Joya has
raised her voice: the least we can do is listen.
Pip Newling is from Readings Port Melbourne.
She volunteers for Mahboba's Promise, an
Australian-Afghan organisation that assists
destitute widows and orphans in Afghanistan.
Find out more at www.mahbobaspromise.org.
The Junior Officers'
Reading Club
Patrick Hennessy
Allen Lane. HB. $45
When we think of soldiers,
what comes to mind are
testosterone-fuelled midwestern Americans. Patrick
Hennessy enrolled in
Sandhurst training academy
straight from Oxford,
encouraged by a blend of boredom and to
pay off the ‘Brideshead-imitation overdrafts’
he’d racked up. He formed the Junior
Officers’ Reading Club in the Iraqi desert,
and amid descriptions of hard-ass officer
training and the reality of modern warfare –
boredom, adrenaline and all – he describes
soldiers going into battle armed with
Penguin Classics, sketchpads and iPods
with speakers, and racing back to queue
for Facebook. This is the voice of the new
millennium military, from one ‘overeducated’ soldier’s perspective.
The Lost Child
Julie Myerson
Bloomsbury. PB. $32.99
This motherhood memoir
with a difference is well
worth the read simply to join
in the conversation it’s
spurred. In the UK, this
book has been THE literary
scandal of the year, sparking
furious debate about the
ethics or otherwise of its telling. Julie
Myerson, a decorated novelist, tells two
stories here. The first is the story of a woman
who died young two centuries ago. But the
lost child at the centre of the scandal is Julie’s
son Jake, whose cannabis addiction,
aggressive behaviour and ejection from the
family home she details here. Jake has called
his mother 'insane' and 'obscene'; Julie says
she’s trying to expose the issue of superstrength cannabis and the effects its effects
on young users. 'You have to write the book
you have to write,' she says. Read the book
and decide for yourself ...
Perfection
Julie Metz
Scribe. PB. $32.95
Metz and her writer husband, renowned for
his extravagant dinner parties and charismatic charm, live with their young daughter
in picket-fence splendour an hour outside
New York City. She runs a successful design
business and enjoys a coterie of friends,
and Henry has just begun work on a food
book about umami, the Japanese idea of perfection. When he suddenly drops dead from
an embolism, Metz’s life is thrown into chaos.
She is stricken with grief, then humiliation,
bewilderment and rage, when she discovers
Henry had been engaged in multiple affairs,
one for three years with a presumed friend,
who at the time of discovery is babysitting
her daughter. So begins her dig beneath the
deceptive surface of her life. In a deeply honest, intelligent and unputdownable memoir,
Metz trawls through Henry’s emails, notes,
books, psychoanalysis and her own life, and
confronts the five women he was involved
with. Seeing Metz deal with such loss and
betrayal is painful yet somehow captivating,
as is the way she dismantles her lost husband
without vengeance, while seeking to understand him. A top read.
Jason Cotter is from Readings Carlton
Non-Fiction
The Lost Art of Sleep
Michael McGirr
Picador. PB. $32.99
Much-loved writer Michael
McGirr, author of Things You
Get For Free, explores one of
life’s great necessities – and
luxuries – in this warm and
witty book. The arrival of
baby twins reminded McGirr
of the importance of sleep.
Here, he muses on its many benefits, mourns
its demise, observes what the brain gets up
to in the small hours, and makes acquaintance with some of the great sleepers and
wakers of history, from Homer to Shakespeare to Peter Pan.
Killing
Jeff Sparrow
SPIEL David Sornig
A young architect abandons a Melbourne summer
for the streets his grandfather once walked.
A blind woman invites him to play a game.
The Spiel has begun. He must now face the scars
left by the terrible legacy of his ancestry.
9781921401251 Fiction $26.95 Pb
THE UNFORGIVING ROPE Simon Adams
Colonial Western Australia was formed not only
by sea captains, but also by murderers, thieves,
rapists – and the hangman. Hear last words and
watch as bodies dangle at the end of a noose.
A social history of the dark side of WA’s past.
9781921401220 History $32.95 Pb
THE SECRET CURE Sue Woolfe
Eva, a cleaning lady in a scientific laboratory
embarks on a secret mission to discover a cure
for her autistic daughter. The Secret Cure is both
a love story and an exploration of new ways to be
human, honourable and passionate.
9780980296495 Fiction $26.95 Pb
www.uwap.uwa.edu.au
MUP. PB. $34.99
It’s a confronting title – and a
confronting book, too. But
Jeff Sparrow’s literal and
metaphorical journey into
the dark heart of this subject
is also completely and utterly
fascinating. Sparrow is mildly
intrigued, then distractedly
obsessed, with the grisly discovery of a
severed, boxed head of a Turkish soldier, kept
as a trophy by a Gallipoli veteran and handed
in to Echuca police. What makes a person
salvage and treasure something like that? What
does that say about their attitude to killing?
And how does the experience of killing
transform someone? Sparrow’s inquiry into the
origins of the head soon becomes something
else entirely, as he hangs out with a Queensland
roo shooter; tours a Melbourne abattoir;
interviews a prison warden and an executioner;
talks to America’s leading expert on methods of
execution; and meets with various Iraq
veterans. This is a fantastic work of reportage,
both accessible and deeply, intelligently
thoughtful. Like Jon Ronson in the more
playful Men Who Stare at Goats, or Maria
Tumarkin in Traumascapes and Courage, Jeff
Sparrow makes the reader a front-seat passenger on the ride, inviting us to follow his logical
trail of breadcrumbs and make our own
conclusions alongside him. 'If you didn’t want
to look, didn’t that suggest that there was a
reason to open your eyes?' Jeff wonders at the
beginning of his journey. Indeed.
The Third Man factor
John Geiger
Text. PB. $34.95
Again and again, people at the very edge of
death, often adventurers or survivors, report
an unseen being beside them who encourages them to make one final effort to survive.
This phenomenon has occurred to all kinds
of people all over the world, including
Q&A with Jeff Sparrow
Your inquiry into the
subject of killing obviously
began as a personal
curiosity, spawned by the
grisly discovery of a
souvenired soldier’s head
from Gallipoli and the
questions that sparked
about the nature of violence. When did
you realise it would become a book?
Originally, I wanted to do a whole
project about the mummified skull
from Gallipoli. It was such a shocking
artefact – not simply because it was a
bullet-ridden body part, taken from the
trenches, but because it had been stored
in a velvet lined display cabinet, like a
precious collectable. I thought I could
try to find out what had happened and
use that story to discuss the Great War,
a topic that’s long fascinated me. That
particular idea collapsed because there
simply weren’t enough clues – at least not
that I could find – as to how the Turkish
soldier’s head arrived in Australia. So for
a while, I abandoned the whole thing. I
only took it up again after reading a news
article about how US soldiers in Iraq were
collecting photos of corpses. It struck me
that this was probably the same phenomenon that led to the souveniring of a head
from the battlefield of Gallipoli, all those
years ago. So I started wondering what
war in general – and killing in particular
– did to soldiers and to society.
The book is written in such a way that the
reader accompanies you on your search for
answers, rather than being presented with
your findings. I thought this made the book
particularly engaging, and encouraged the
reader to draw their own conclusions and
interrogate their own beliefs. Why did you
decide to write it in this way?
It was partly forced upon me, in that
very early it became apparent that getting
access to people and material would be
difficult. So I wanted to foreground the
process I took and the difficulties that
I faced, to talk about the information
I couldn’t get as much as that which I
found. But it also seemed appropriate
in that most of the time I was genuinely
conflicted about the material. In the
(slim) literature about killing, you can
find people describing combat as the
worst moment of their lives – then a minute later, discussing how nothing they’ve
done since has been as exhilarating as the
few minutes they were in battle. I kept
meeting different people who argued
different things, and I wanted the reader
to share that experience of the perspective
shifting. Moreover, it’s an area in which
it’s difficult not to become emotional.
One of your findings was that once the
process of killing becomes familiar, ‘the
participants worried more about efficiency
than anything else’. That was also your own
experience while helping out the Queensland roo shooter you interviewed. Did that
finding surprise you? What do you think it
says about human nature and violence?
Humans are social animals and so I suppose it shouldn’t seem strange that social
approval matters so much. But, yes, it
did surprise me how much I wanted the
approval of the guy who took me roo
shooting, even though it’s not something
I’ve ever done before and I can’t imagine ever doing it again. In the book, I
quote Siegfried Sassoon, discussing some
particularly awful event in World War I
and mentioning that, more than anything
else, he was worried about making a fool
of himself. It does seem to be a common
experience.
See www.readings.com.au for the full
version of this interview.
mountaineers, aviators, astronauts and 9/11
survivors. The mysterious force has been
explained as everything from hallucination
to divine intervention. Recent neurological research suggests something else. John
Geiger combines history, science and great
story-telling to explain this secret to survival.
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Canongate. PB. $35
Before The Wire, there was
The Corner. David Simon
and Ed Burns’ cult hit HBO
series is lauded by many
critics as the best television
show ever made. In fact, one
literary critic has infamously
asked why The Wire is so
much better than most contemporary
novels. It’s Dickens does twentieth century
Baltimore, dissecting a failed city – one of
America’s notorious crime capitals – layer by
layer, from the perspectives of police, the
drug denizens, ordinary citizens, the political
system, the media and the school system.
Underpinning the show – and explaining the
intricate accuracy of its portraits and the
knifepoint savviness of its social analysis –
are two monumental works of reportage that
display all the brilliant characterisation of
The Wire. The first was Homicide, Simons’
impressive first book (lauded by Norman
Mailer), based on his year embedded in
Baltimore’s homicide unit. There, he met
Burns, a homicide detective and former
schoolteacher who first teamed with him for
this follow-up, which explores the other side
of the equation – life in the heart of the
ghetto, on the drug corners, viewed from the
inside over the course of a year, focusing on
one block and a handful of families.
Gripping, heartbreaking, unmissable.
Also available: Homicide (David Simons,
Canongate, PB, $34.95).
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David Simons & Ed Burns
ARMAGEDDON
IN RETROSPECT
Kurt Vonnegut
Vintage. PB. $29.95
There are those of us for
whom the name Kurt
Vonnegut will always evoke a
sense of magic. Vonnegut
was one of those timeless
writers, a man who spoke
both for the times in which
he lived, and beyond, into
the future. Since Vonnegut's passing, in
April 2007, a few new books have appeared. This handsome volume, a collection
of previously unpublished short stories and
speeches, is a must for all fans of Vonnegut
and great writing. Exploring the twin
themes of war and peace, these pieces
sparkle with Vonnegut's typical wit,
wisdom, and humanity, and they also reveal
the growth of Vonnegut, as both a writer
and as a human being. Opening with a
loving introduction from Vonnegut's son
Mark, the book also contains a letter sent
by Vonnegut to his parents when the
author was a prisoner of war. Illustrated
throughout with Vonnegut's own art, this
book is as beautiful as it is valuable.
Mark Azzopardi is from Readings Hawthorn
Australian History
The Politics of Suffering
Peter Sutton
MUP. PB. $34.99
Peter Sutton is a leading
Australian anthropologist
who has lived and worked
closely with Aboriginal
communities. In this groundbreaking book, he asks why,
after three decades of liberal
thinking, has the suffering
and grief in so many Aboriginal communi-
ties become worse? He marshals shocking
evidence against the failures of the past, and
argues provocatively that three decades of
liberal consensus on Aboriginal issues has
collapsed. Combining original observation
with deep emotional engagement, The
Politics of Suffering offers hope for a new
era in Indigenous politics.
The Bardia Myth
Craig Stockings
UNSW. HB. $59.95
The successful assault on the
Italian fortress town of Bardia,
led by Australian soldiers in
1941, was considered one of
the greatest military feats in
Australian history. Yet, it is
neglected by historians and
barely known by Australians.
After 55 hours of heavy fighting, the Australians captured around 40,000 Italian prisoners
and large quantities of arms and equipment
– at a cost of 130 killed and 326 wounded.
Here is the full story.
History
D-Day
Antony Beevor
Viking. HB. $59.95
Antony Beevor is the master of the pageturning narrative history. Here he delivers
yet again. Even Stalin was awed by D-Day –
by far the largest invasion fleet ever known.
Although the scale and the meticulous
planning were unprecedented, the battle of
Normandy was still far more difficult than
anyone imagined. The casualty-heavy war
marked not just a generation, but the whole
of the post-war world, profoundly influencing relations between America and Europe.
This is the most vivid and well-researched
account yet of this event.
1959: The Year
Everything Changed
Fred Kaplan
Wiley. HB. $47.95
Pulitzer prize-winning writer
Fred Kaplan looks past the
1960s to the year that really
changed America. 1959 saw
the pop culture rise of artists
like Norman Mailer and
Miles Davis; the onset of
civil rights laws and protests;
the Pill; America’s entry into the war in
Vietnam; and the invention of the microchip that launched the computer age.
This deeply researched, engrossingly told
book highlights an overlooked period in
American history.
Balibo
Jil Joliffe
Scribe. PB. $29.95
This marvellous work of memoir/history/
reportage (originally published as Cover Up)
was the basis for the major new film of the
same name. The result of over 20 years of
research and personal investigations, Balibo
provides a first-hand account of the deaths
of the five Australian journalists killed by
the Indonesian military in 1975. Joliffe tells
their personal stories and argues that the
Australian government was complicit in a
cover-up that was a key factor in Indonesia’s
subsequent invasion and occupation of
East Timor.
The History
of the Mafia
Salvatore Lupo
Columbia University Press. PB. $74
A fascinating true history of
perhaps the strangest of pop
culture icons – the Sicilian
Mafia. A leading historian
on modern Italy and major
authority on its criminal
history, Salavtore Lupo sees
Standout
releases from
Australia’s
small publishers
They Told Me I
Had To Write This
Kim Miller
$17.95
“This is a must read.”
— Terry O’Connell,
Director Real Justice
Blamed for the death
of his mother and
carrying a terrible
secret from the past,
Clem is now in a school for toxic teenagers.
And that rev-head counsellor wants him to
write letters.
Ford Street Publishing
Swimming
Enza Gandolfo
$29.95
Kate Wilks believes
she has a good
life until a chance
encounter
with
her ex-husband.
Swimming is a
lyrical story of one
woman’s journey.
A novel about loss
and survival, friendship and love, creativity
and fulfilment, it will resonate with anyone
whose life hasn’t turned out as planned.
Short-listed for the ABC Fiction Award 2008.
the Mafia as an organisation and a mindset
dedicated to the preservation of tradition,
providing its own social and political
justice. This definitive account focuses on
several crucial periods of transition: the
Italian unification of 1860 to 1861, the
murder of noted politician Notarbartolo,
fascist repression of the Mafia, the Allied
invasion of 1943, social conflicts after each
world war, and the major murders and
trials of the 1980s.
The Stalin Archives
Jonathan Brent
Scribe. PB. $29.95
As the editorial director of Yale
University Press, Brent was
one of the first westerners to
go to the former Societ Union
seeking access to the Soviet
archives for publication. A task
both wanted and feared by
Russians in equal measure: a
need for recognition of a new openess, the
need for money, the desire for historical
reconcilation, yet also a symbolic surrender of
the self. And what he finds, as much outside
the archives as in, is a country hopelessly lost
between worlds, confused, faltering; the
nation, like every contract he tries to sign, on
the brink of collapse. The story is both a travel
memoir and intellectual quest – searching for a
place and a truth that are ever elusive. He
captures marvelously the bundle of contradictions that was Moscow in the early nineties:
the bizarre politics whereby the more the ‘truth’
of the Stalinist system came out, the more
so-called Communists and statists clung to his
image and the excesses of that system – antisemitic, authoritarian, and nationalistic.
Mirroring this were the ‘liberals’ – crony
capitalists, gangsters, and corrupt bureaucrats,
epitomising the worst excesses of capitalism.
Andrew Cornish is Manager
of Readings Carlton
Vanark Press
The Whorl & The
Pallin
Ian Nichols
$28.95
A coming of age
quest leads Tom to
discover that being
different has its advantages. YA readers
will love following
Tom’s journey, with
plenty of action on
the high seas, through enchanted forests and
in battles against man and beast. Dust jacket
folds out to display a detailed drawn map.
Tactile Books
THE Spectre at
the Feast
Andrew Gamble
Palgrave. PB. $39.95
After a long feast of prosperity in the western
world, the crisis in the financial markets has
conjured up an old spectre – the spectre of
capitalist crisis. Past crises have been characterised by threat of slump, collapse, polarisation, conflict, and even war, spreading to all
parts of the global economy. This important
new book by a leading authority sets the current financial crisis in historical context and
assesses its global consequences, how far it
might go, and what is to be done.
Business
extempore 2
Miriam Zolin (ed.)
$30.00
Writing Art Jazz
Improvisation
Forget what you
think you know
about jazz and improvised
music.
Contributions by
Bill Leak, Mandy Sayer, Pi Oh and more, and
packed with interviews, essays, fiction, poetry,
photographs, prints, reviews and a bonus CD
of great jazz. A feast for the eyes and ears.
extempore
SPUNC represents more than 60 small publishers
around Australia. Check them out online today.
SPUNC
The Small Press Underground
Networking Community
Politics
spunc.com.au
Sages: Warren Buffett,
George Soros, Paul
Volcker and the
Maelstrom of the
Markets
Charles R. Morris
Black Inc. PB. $29.95
Throughout the violent
financial disruptions of the
past several years, three men
have stood out as beacons of
judgment and wisdom:
Warren Buffett, George Soros
and Paul Volcker. Though
their experiences and styles
vary – Buffett is the canny stock market
investor; Soros is the reader of shifting
global tides in trade and currencies; and
Volcker is the regulator and governor, sheriff
and clean-up crew – they have a lot in
common. Applying his own deep understanding of markets and finance, prolific writer and
former banker Morris brilliantly distils the
wisdom and experience of these men.
Natural History
Wildflower
Mark Seal
Orion. PB. $32.99
Wildflower is the story of
Joan Root, one half of a
great wildlife film-making
partnership, with her husband
Allan. They produced some of
our best-loved documentary
films and changed the way we
view nature – especially the
wildlife inhabitants of Africa. But this is Joan’s
story. She was born in Nairobi to a British
father and South African mother and lived
much of her life in Lake Naivasha, on a beautiful 80-acre property. She was brought up to
be self-reliant and was an only child. Her idyllic life and film-making partnership changed
after 20 years, when Allan met Jennie Hammond, whom he would later marry. Joan
had to find her own voice – which she did
thorough conservation work, especially the
safe guarding of Lake Naivasha’s fish habitats.
Mark Seal captures the essence of a shy and
introverted girl, for a time obscured by her
flamboyant husband, who remains a strong
and resolute woman, until her untimely
death. This book is enriched by a cast of real
life wildlife personalities, such as David Attenborough, Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, and
Joy and George Adamson. This engaging read
truly illuminates your sense of wonderment at
wildlife – and at this determined woman.
Michael Awosoga-Samuel is
from Readings Carlton
Roger’s World:
Towards a New
Understanding
of Animals
Charles Siebert
Scribe. PB. $29.95
A moving and insightful book that sheds
new light on our understanding and treatment of animals. Roger is a 28-year-old
chimpanzee, a former circus entertainer who
prefers human company to that of his fellow
chimps. Siebert tells the story of his relationship with Roger, but also the larger story
of his travels – and close encounters of the
animal kind – in Africa and the US. He tells
of elephants suffering a collective nervous
breakdown and reveals the ‘dark heart’ of
captive chimpdom – and suggests a new way
forward in our fraught relationship with the
animal world.
Food & Wine
Vefa’s Kitchen
Vefa Alexiadou
Phaidon. HB. $69.95
Vefa Alexiadou, the leading
authority of Greek cusine,
presents the first authoritative
and all-encompassing Greek
recipe book in English. Doing
for Greek cuisine what the
hugely successful Silver Spoon
did for Italian, it contains
more than 700 fully updated, straightforward
and mouth-watering recipes. Aimed at all
lovers of Mediterranean food, the book will
appeal to anyone who loves to cook easy,
tempting and delicious dishes, from salads
and mezedes in summer, to slowly simmered
meat dishes and crisp filo pastries in winter.
Parenting
Attack of the Fifty
Foot Hormones
Emma Tom
This frank, funny book about women’s experience of pregnancy will appeal to the same
women who’ve embraced Kaz Cooke’s Up the
Duff. Like Kaz, Emma Tom goes behind the
BOOKS WITH SPINE BOOKS WITH SPINE BOOKS WITH SPINE BOOKS WITH SPINE BOOKS WITH SPINE BOOKS WITH SPINE
DESPERATELY
SEEKING
MADONNA
After her mother’s death in 2005, author
and journalist Anne Summers inherits a
portrait of her mother as a child. Drawn to
investigate the story behind the portrait
and its artist, she soon discovers there was
also a second painting of her mother: this
time as the Madonna.
In a powerful exploration of art, loss and
love, Anne Summers enthrals us with a
gripping narrative that is part art history,
part detective story and part meditation on
motherhood.
AVAILABLE NOW
BOOKS WITH SPINE
www.mup.com.au
New from Palgrave Macmillan
Carrying the Fire
Michael Collins flew in both the Gemini 10 and
Apollo 11 space missions in the 1960s.
The years that have
passed since Neil
Armstrong, Buzz
Aldrin, and Michael
Collins piloted the
Apollo 11 spacecraft
to the moon in July
1969 have done
nothing to alter the
fundamental wonder
of the event: man
reaching the moon
remains one of the
great eventsótechnical
and spiritualóof
our lifetime. In this
remarkable book,
Michael Collins conveys, in a very personal way, the
drama, beauty, and humor of that adventure.
$32.95 Pb, ISBN 9780374531942
Publish August 2009, 512 pages
Henry Holt And Company
Dread
Philip Alcabes, the City University of New York.
The average individual
is far more likely to die
in a car accident than
from a communicable
disease...yet we are
still much more fearful
of the epidemic. Even
at our most levelheaded, the thought
of an epidemic can
inspire terror. As Philip
Alcabes persuasively
argues in Dread,
our anxieties about
epidemics are created
not so much by the
germ or microbe in question-or the actual risks of
contagion-but by the unknown, the undesirable,
and the misunderstood.
$49.95 Hb, ISBN 9781586486181
Publish August 2009, 336 pages
Public Affairs
myths and platitudes to look at real women’s
real experiences. She has interviewed hundreds of pregnant women and sympathetic
professionals to reveal how women feel, cope
and stay sane during pregnancy. She also
shares her hilarious pregnancy diary, exploring
issues like strangers thinking it’s okay to grope
your groin and the temptation to eat for not
just two, but three or four.
Theology
The Case for God
Karen Armstrong
Bodley Head. PB. $32.95
Bestselling books by Richard
Dawkins, Christopher
Hitchens and others prove the
current popularity of
anti-religion. On the other
hand, there’s still a real hunger
for spirituality in some sectors
of the community. Former
nun Karen Armstrong is one of the world’s
leading writers and thinkers on religion. Here,
she traces the history of faith from the
Paleolithic Age to the present, showing that
science and religion have often peacefully
co-existed. She suggests that if we draw
creatively on the insights of the past, we can
build a faith that speaks to the needs of our
troubled and polarised age.
8E@:<>@ICC@B<D<
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Rosie Boycott is a pioneering feminist, journalist
and one of the founders of Virago publishing
house. She is also a reformed alcoholic. This is
the story of how a nice girl like her made it from
the top to the bottom – and back again – during
the wild, heady and fragmented 1970s.
Set in the closing months of the Second World
War, one of the most brutal periods in human
history, this is an extraordinarily powerful and
moving story of a terrified German family on
the run from the advancing Russian army.
th Estate
The Book of Rapture
The Tricking of Freya
NIKKI GEMMELL
CHRISTINA SUNLEY
Three children wake
up in a basement room.
They have been drugged
and taken from their
beds in the middle of
the night. Now they are
alone. Where are their parents? Who can they
trust? The family has been betrayed to the
government and Salt Cottage, their home on
a clifftop above the ocean, is no longer safe.
Their mother’s scientific work has put them
all in danger. To protect them, she must let
them go.
This is the story of Freya
Morris, daughter of sober
and responsible Anna, niece
of wild and unpredictable
Birdie, and granddaughter
of the revered poet Olafur.
Olafur and his wife fled Iceland to Canada
after the massive volcano eruption of 1875.
A series of events leaves Freya with a sense
of shame and loss: a freak accident, Freya’s
kidnapping, a return to Iceland, and the
accidental discovery of a long-hidden family
secret.
ecology, sustainability, climate change, environment studies
new titles from Spinifex Press
Soil Not Oil: Climate Change
Vandana Shiva brilliantly reveals what connects humanity’s most urgent crises—food
insecurity, peak oil, and climate change—and why any attempt to solve one without
addressing the others will get us nowhere. Bold and visionary, Soil Not Oil calls for a
return to sound agricultural principles and a world based on self-organisation, community,
and environmental justice.
Earth’s Breath
Susan Hawthorne explores climate change through ‘eco-poetry’. Readable, accessible
poetry for anyone wanting to make sense of natural disaster or experience the power of
the natural environment.
To record an eye-witness tale of cyclone is one thing; to appreciate it as a supremely dramatic
instance of the cosmos’s own tolling is something else again. —Kris Hemmensley, poet &
bookseller
Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice
Ariel Salleh (ed)
These essays by internationally distinguished women thinkers expose the limits of
current policy and thought in political economy, ecological economics and sustainability
science.
www.spinifexpress.com.au
Reference
The English Language
Charles Barber
CUP. HB. $45
A history of the English
language, from its prehistoric
Indo-European origins to
today. Charles Barber looks at
the nature of language and
language change, tracing the
evolution of grammar,
pronunciation and semantics.
Topics covered include English in the
scientific age, English as a world language and
the future of the language. Barber illustrates
his argument by drawing on a range of classic
texts, including Chaucer and Shakespeare.
Psychology
Free From Lies
Alice Miller
WW Norton. HB. $42.95
Since the landmark publication of The
Drama of the Gifted Child, no one has
been more influential than Alice Miller
in empowering adults whose lives were
maimed emotionally and physically during
childhood. Now she goes further, presenting groundbreaking theories that enhance
communication between therapist and
patient and enable adults to express powerful emotions that have been trapped for
years. Practical and perceptive, Miller’s
work explains what to expect from therapy,
how to identify the causes of pain, and
why subconscious pain, unaddressed for
decades, manifests itself later as depression,
self-mutilation, primal inadequacy, and
chronic loneliness.
In Two Minds: Tales
of a Psychologist
Paul Valent
UNSW Press. PB. $39.95
Paul Valent, retired medical
doctor, psychiatrist, psychotherapist and traumatologist,
describes the struggles and
discoveries in his varied
four-decade career. Each
chapter offers a glimpse into
the psychotherapeutic
encounter, from the author’s field work with
survivors of the Ash Wednesday bushfires, to
the private challenges of unearthing childhood
trauma in a sex offender. Valent articulates and
grapples with ubiquitous human issues such
as morality, trauma, illness and death.
Philosophy
Therapy of Desire:
Theory and Practice
in Hellenistic Ethics
Martha Nussbaum
Princeton University Press. PB. $68
The Epicureans, Skeptics,
and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached
intellectual discipline, but as
a worldly art of grappling
with issues of daily and urgent
human significance: the fear
of death, love and sexuality,
anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed
both at understanding and at producing the
flourishing of human life. Martha Nussbaum
examines texts of philosophers committed
to a therapeutic paradigm and recovers a
valuable source for our moral and political
thought of today.
Music
Revolution in the Air:
Songs of Bob Dylan
Vol 1
Clinton Heylin
Hardie Grant. HB. $45
Clinton Heylin, named ‘the
only Dylanologist worth
reading’ by The New York
Times, presents the first
comprehensive account of
Dylan’s songs arranged in the
order he wrote them. Heylin
recounts the story of each
song as it is written, giving a full appreciation of the songs themselves as well as
Dylan the emerging artist. ‘Better than any
biography could ever be, and a crucial
Dylan book.’ – Jonathan Lethem
Audio Books
DIE FOR YOU AUDIO
(Unabridged)
Lisa Unger
10 CDs. $39.95
A nightmare journey from bustling glamorous
New York City to the murky streets of Prague.
Isabel and Marcus Raines are the perfect couple.
But one morning, Marcus disappears and Isabel
soon learns from police that her husband had
been using a dead man’s identity for years.
Now the chase is on to find the truth.
CAPRICORNIA AUDIO
(Unabridged)
Xavier Herbert
20 CDs. Duration: 23 hours 40 minutes.
$49.95
Spanning three generations, Capricornia
tells the story of Australia’s North. In 1904,
brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth
arrive from the South to join the Capricornian Government Service. But it
is Mark’s son, who struggles to find a place
in the world, who embodies the complexities
of Capricornia itself.
WOMEN IN BLACK
AUDIO (Unabridged)
Madeleine St John
Read by: Deidre Rubenstein.
5 CDs. $34.95
Duration: 5 hours, 55 minutes.
This modern Australian classic, a superb
comedy of manners, illuminates the lives
of the ‘women in black’ at F.G. Goode's
department store in 1960s Sydney.
Art & Design
Happy Birthday
Thames & HUDSON!
July is the month to celebrate 60 years of
Thames & Hudson – consistent producer
of beautiful books. One lucky Readings
customer can win a set of 20 titles from their
excellent WOA series. See p2 for details.
Kings Way:
The Beginnings of
Australian Graffiti,
Melbourne 1983-93
Cubrilo, Harvey & Stamer
Miegunyah. HB. $64.99
A comprehensive account of
the first decade of the graffiti
writing subculture in
Melbourne, Australia.
Beginning in 1983, as the
New York break-dancing
craze was sweeping the globe,
Kings Way tells the story of
the development of a hardcore underground
scene of local 'writers' and their commitment to 'getting up'. These writers pioneered
the elaborate spray-paint murals that now
dominate Melbourne's cityscape.
Younger than Jesus:
The Artist Directory
The New Museum
Phaidon. PB. $75
Younger than Jesus:
The Reader
The New Museum
Steidl. PB. $75
The exhibition, at the New Museum, New
York, presents 50 artists from 25 countries, all
born after 1976, chosen by a range of curators around the globe through an interactive
network of referrals and informants. The
accompanying books document and profile
the artists, and present a selection of essays exploring the ramifications of art, culture, tech-
nology and history as it is being played out
by this generation. It’s an ambitious project to
‘attempt to come to terms with a generation
that has already excited the curiosity of sociologists, theorists, journalists, marketing experts
and intellectuals’. A brief foray into the reader
has given me the encouraging news that technology is sexier than fashion/fragrances, and
that actually fundamentally there’s not a huge
difference between the Baby Boomers, Gen
X and this lot. I am, however, very interested
in the art they are making, not so much as
to check out new ‘trends’ (yuk, get your own
trend), but because it seems their technosavvy selves make them pretty informed about
politics, history and global affairs, and give
them a firm grasp of the creative possibilities
of new media. Coupled with interests in family, community, religion, identity, and possibly
the notion that cosmopolitanism is about the
challenge of difference, a lot of these artists
work with collectives as well as individually.
They seem an interesting bunch and I look
forward to finding out more about them.
Margaret Snowdon is Art & Design Buyer at
Readings Carlton
A subtle love story and
environmental fable for
our times
The river wife—part human, part fish—has
a duty to tend the river, but instead falls in
love with a man. Tender and melancholy,
her story speaks of desire and love, mothers
and daughters, kinship and care, sacrifice
and wisdom. With watery reflections of the
Orpheus myth, this otherworldly tale is a
stunningly beautiful original.
A major new crime series at the
sharp end of urban life
Cy Twombly:
The Natural World
Contemporary London is a city where one
man’s crime is another man’s justice. When
a paedophile is brutally murdered in his own
home, it’s just another day in the life of D.I.
Staffe. Nothing is simple, least of all Staffe’s
personal life, as he digs for answers into the
grime of the city and under pressure from his
boss and the media. A gritty, exhilarating ride
from the new voice in British crime.
James Rondeau
Yale. HB. $69.95
This beautiful book presents beautiful and
poetic work by Twombly on the subject of
nature. Featuring more than 30 paintings,
works on paper, photographs and sculptures
created during the last decade, the subjects
include landscapes, seascapes and gardens.
Looking at these works (I wish they were the
originals), I mourn for those who have spent
the last 30 years attempting to theoretically
dismiss beauty to the dumpbin of bland, and
feel sorry for the all the abstract paintings
out there trying to be beautiful, but falling
into that same dumpbin. MS
Exactitude:
Hyperrealist Art Today
John Russell Taylor
New in July
Norton
HB
$42.95
From the best-selling author of The
Body Never Lies comes an astoundingly
moving and perceptive work on how
adults can finally overcome the traumas
of their childhood.
Wiley
HB
$47.95
The events of 1959 laid the groundwork
for the turbulent decades that followed.
From Ginsberg’s Howl to civil rights
laws, the Vietnam War, birth control and
the Space Race, the year triggered a
vital period in history.
www.wiley.com
Thames & Hudson. HB. $105
Published to accompany an exhibition at the
Plus One Gallery in London, this astonishing
book presents a selection of contemporary
artists working in a figurative, hyperrealist
style. It includes work ranging from still lifes
and extreme close-ups to large-scale cityscapes
and landscape painting, and features an
enormous range of artists from around the
world, all of them working in a meticulous
fashion, all of them seeing the brushstroke
as subservient to the image itself. This large
volume is great value and features a style that
is always intriguing, and particularly so with a
contemporary twist. MS
Jeff Koons
Eckhard Schneider,
Ingrid Sischy et al
Taschen. HB. $160
From kinky to kitsch to
conceptual, Jeff Koons’ art is
anything but conformist.
Since he stirred up the art
world establishment in the
1980s with his unapologetic
basketball sculptures and
stainless steel toy blow-ups,
Koons has been known as somewhat of a
bad boy – a reputation he confirmed in the
early 1990s via works depicting him having
sex with then-wife Cicciolina, the Italian
porn star-cum-politician. But at the same
time he charmed the art world with Puppy,
a 40-foot tall floral terrier that now resides
at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,
Spain. Koons’ exploitation of the banal, in
the aggrandisement and/or embodiment of
kitsch and pop imagery, has become his
trademark; detractors may delight in their
naysaying, but Koons’ work commands
millions at auction and his position at the
forefront of contemporary art is indisputable. MS
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Kids’ Books
Board Books
Ten Little Fingers
and Ten Little Toes
Mem Fox & Helen Oxenbury (illus.)
Puffin. Board. $16.95
From two of the most
gifted picture book
creators of our time,
here is a celebration of
babies and the joy they
bring to everyone,
everywhere.
Lost and Found
Oliver Jeffers
Harper. Board. $14.99
A gorgeous story about friendship and discovery – and the rowboat journey of a boy
and a penguin to the South Pole.
Picture Books
Hello Baby
Quirky, homespun, crafty; this is a delightful picture story with a contemporary look
and an ageless message. KK
Poetry
A Child’s Introduction
to Poetry
Michael Driscoll
ABC. HB & CD. $24.99
A fabulous introduction to a wide range
of classic and contemporary poetry, from
nursery rhymes and nonsense verse to ballads,
haikus and sonnets. Readers will meet famous
poets throughout history, including William
Blake, Hilaire Belloc and Maya Angelou.
Middle Fiction
The Greatest Blogger
in the World
Andrew McDonald
Yes, this is all about animals and their poo,
and as one who has a slight aversion to the
plethora of bum and fart books around, I
sighed inwardly when I first saw it. Aaah, but
this is a poo book with a purpose. Mouse, who
is full of curiosity, wants to know what all his
animal friends have in their nappies. Lift the
flap and see – horse’s three round droppings,
doggie’s poo with a pointy end, rabbit’s seven
pellets etc. But when they all want to see what is
in mouse’s nappy, they are in for a big surprise.
It’s empty. Because mouse uses the potty for
his little pellets. Now everyone wants to sit on
the potty. It’s fun, silly and eminently useful!
Kathy Kozlowski is from Readings Carlton
Hardie Grant. PB. $16.95
The Greatest Blogger in the
World is a funny mystery
book that features a nerd in
disguise, a person who’s as
boring as cardboard, a friend
who always makes money, a
little brother who insists on
wearing a tuxedo, a girl who
wears huge boots to school, a duck called
Barcode, and the most fun teacher ever, who
makes school fun! This book makes you feel
connections between the characters and
yourself – and kids you know. Charlie Ridge,
has a big goal in life: to be the world’s greatest
blogger. But with competition like nasty old
Dr Maryloaf, his hopes of winning aren’t very
high. But suddenly, he has a heap to blog
about, including a mystery to solve on who
stole the unshorn merino (a big, fluffy sheep).
Charlie, Cardboard (aka Lance), Phattius
Beats and the Boots (aka Eleanor Cameron)
all work together to solve the mystery, and
Charlie has to find time for blogging. How
will this catastrophe end? Then, when he gets
a lot of surprises, what will Charlie be
thinking? To find out, you’ll have to read!
Felix Wilkins is in Year Four at Kingsville
Primary. After reading this book, he is a blogger.
Bugs in a Blanket
Just Macbeth
Mem Fox &
Steve Jenkins (illus.)
Viking. HB. $24.95
Clever monkey babies, dusty lion babies, sleepy
leopard babies, hairy warthog babies. But
which baby is the most treasured one of all?
Peek-a-Poo:
What’s in your Nappy?
Guido van Genechten
Beatrice Alemagna
Phaidon. PB. $16.95
A story told in wool embroidery and
collage, this is the rather endearing tale
of Fat Little Bug’s party. The bugs have
always lived in the same old blanket at
the bottom of the garden, each in their
own hole, never seeing each other till the
party brings them together. They find how
different each looks from the other quite
unexpected and are initially judgemental of
each other. But they soon begin to discover
they are different, well ... just because they
are. Which doesn’t matter. So let’s party.
Andy Griffiths
& Terry Denton (illus.)
Pan Macmillan. PB. Normally $14.99
Our Special Price $11.95
This is the story of three
friends who make a magic
potion that sends them back
into time. There they meet
three witches that confuse
their identity and there does
not seem to be anything they
can do about that. There are
parts that are really funny and made me smile
a lot. There are a lot of murders though and
lots of wizz fizz jokes. I love wizz fizz and so
must Andy Griffiths. The illustrations by
Terry are very good and make the story even
weirder. Even C3PO and R2D2 are mixed up
with it all. There is a little picture of this guy
called William Shakespeare on pretty much
every page. He lets you know how many
pages you have read. I thought this was great
and read it very quickly. If so many people
hadn’t died I would have given it ten out of
ten, but because of the deaths it loses a point.
Andras Kerekes is eight years old
Young Adult
Suite Scarlett
Maureen Johnson
of war, and more than a year since the Battle
of Cadell. On a mountainside in Elster, Bea,
who has lived among the elves all this time,
longs to see her human friends again. When
strange creatures disturb the tranquillity of
the mountain forests and her grandfather
disappears, she calls for Marcel's help ...
Bounce
Natasha Friend
Scholastic. PB. $14.99
What happens when you’re forced to leave the
only life you’ve ever known, to move in with a
bunch of strangers? When you can’t stand the
woman your father’s in love with? When you
find yourself falling hard and fast for your 20year-old stepbrother? Welcome to the world
of 13-year-old Evyn Linney, who juggles the
perils of a new stepfamily and a new life,
while talking daily to her dead mother, the
touchstone she’s always relied on.
Scholastic. PB. $16.99
If your family owns a hotel in New York City
and on your fifteenth birthday you get your
own suite, it seems you would have it made
for the summer. As Scarlett relates it, it’s not
quite that glamorous when the hotel is run
entirely by your family and getting your own
suite means being responsible for its guests and
cleaning. Scarlett has little hope that her summer will be exciting – what with all the housekeeping and her richer friends away for the
summer – but all that changes with the arrival
of a rich, mysterious guest (a former Broadway star) who hires Scarlett as her assistant.
Throw into the mix her brothers’ acting troupe
performing Shakespeare in the parking garage
and his sexy actor friend and Scarlett’s summer
becomes a fantastic, funny romp through New
York. I fell in love with Scarlett and her wry,
sarcastic take on the craziness that surrounds
her and her family. After all, how can you go
past Hamlet performed on unicycles?!
Marie Matteson is from Readings
Port Melbourne
Walker. HB. $29.95
The nail-biting sequel to The
Knife of Never Letting Go.
Todd has carried a desperately
wounded Viola the last few
feet into Haven ... and right
into the hands of their worst
enemy, Mayor Prentiss. In
exchange for Viola’s safety,
Todd is forced to work with the Mayor in
creating a new society for the settlers to come,
one based on bringing an ominous-sounding
order to the chaos of New Prentisstown. But
what secrets are hiding just outside of town?
And who are the mysterious Answer?
Stolen
The Silver Blade
Chicken House. PB. $17.99
Gemma is standing in line for coffee at Bangkok Airport, when a cute guy helps her out,
drugs her and kidnaps her. She wakes up in a
rough bare room in the middle of the outback,
where the only person visible is Ty (the cute
guy from the airport). What follows is a fascinating thriller in which Gemma tries to get
back home and Ty tries to convince her that
home is with him in the vast central deserts
of Australia. Lucy Christopher was raised in
Melbourne and now lives in the UK and she
has done an amazing job of portraying English
Gemma’s fear and awe of the vast middle of
Australia. What sounds like a straightforward
thriller becomes a nuanced, complex take on a
landscape of beauty and danger and one girl’s
fight to regain control of her life. MM
Orion. HB. $28.99
Another historical adventure from the author
of The Red Necklace. With Sido safely in England and the Terror at its height, Yann returns
to France to smuggle out aristocratic refugees
who will otherwise face the guillotine. But
when Sido is kidnapped, he must use all his
strength and courage to outwit the evil Count
Kalliovski, and rescue her for a second time.
Sally Gardner brings to life the horrors of the
French Revolution, complete with intrepid
heroism and a touching love story.
Lucy Christopher
The Book from
Baden Dark
James Moloney
Harper. PB. $19.99
The compelling conclusion to the Baden
Dark trilogy. Three years have passed since
Marcel defeated Mortregis, the great dragon
THE Ask and
the Answer: Chaos
Walking Book Two
Patrick Ness
Sally Gardner
Free Stories:
Celebrating Human
Rights
Amnesty International
Walker. PB. $17.95
To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Walker Books and Amnesty International
have joined together to create a short-story
collection for young adults, celebrating what
it means to be free. Authors include David
Almond, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Ursula
Dubosarsky and Margaret Mahy.
OU
T1 A
OUT AUGUST
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TN
OU
THE BEST
NOVELS
August 21 – 30 2009
Federation Square
www.mwf.com.au
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Program revealed in The Age and
on the MWF website Friday 17 July
2009 Bookings open 17 July 2009
on the MWF website
August 21 – 30 2009
Federation Square
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on the MWF website
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sleeperspublishing.com
“Gullifer’s bitterly hilarious
lampoon portrays real estate
agents as grotesques in an outlandish competition that... is
devastatingly familiar.”
—T B I
MWF_CAE_127.5x88.75_1/8.indd 1
22/6/09 10:11:42 AM
“An unflinching examination
of familial and communal
bonds. Masterful, poignant,
powerful and true... A wonderful novel.”
—C T
Readings Famous Bargain Table
Bargains on the web : New books are regularly added to our website. Click on the Bargains tab at www.readings.com.au.
Girl of His Dreams
Cucina Del Sole
PB. Was $32.95. Now $13.95
An intriguing mystery about
a ten-year-old gypsy girl,
found dead in a canal, in
possession of a man’s watch
and wedding ring, and
suffering from the effects of a
sexually transmitted disease.
HB. Was $59.95. Now $19.95
Nancy Harmon Jenkins has
lived in Italy for 15 years. In
Cucina Del Sole, she describes
this wonderful region, from
Naples to the toe of Italy, that
is still unspoiled by tourism –
with its own rich culinary
traditions.
Donna Leon
Indignation
Phillip Roth
HB. Was $39.95. Now $15.95
It's America, 1951, the
second year of the Korean
War and a studious, intense
youngster from Newark, New
Jersey is beginning his
sophomore year on the
pastoral, conservative campus
of Ohio’s Winesburg College.
The Boyds
Brenda Niall
PB. Was $45. Now $15.95
The extraordinary story of
the Boyd family: Australia’s
most remarkable artistic
dynasty. Brenda Niall tells
the fascinating history of the
lives and work of this family
of painters, potters, sculptors,
architects and writers.
The Pankhursts
Martin Pugh
PB. Was $29.95. Now $12.95
The suffragettes outraged
Victorian society – yet
behind the protests, arrests,
and hunger strikes, the
family lives of Emmeline
Pankhurst and her daughters,
the movement’s leading
lights, were just as dramatic.
Life of Picasso Vol 3:
THE TRIUMPHANT YEARS,
1917-1932
John Richardson
PB. Was $59.95. Now $16.95
John Richardson has
produced the long-awaited
third volume of the definitive
biography, based on exhaustive research full of original,
groundbreaking new insights
into Picasso's life and work.
LUCKY CITY:
THE FIRST GENERATION
AT BALLARAT 1851-1901
Weston Bate
PB. Was $45. Now $13.95
Lucky City explores man’s
interaction with the environment, and shows how, from a
makeshift boom town,
Ballarat grew, matured and
sponsored such images of
itself as ‘Golden City’ and
‘City of Gardens’.
Leonard Woolf
Victoria Glendinning
HB. Was $59.95. Now $19.95
A shrewdly perceptive and
lively portrait of a complex
man of extremes and
contradictions: a fighter for
polical causes, friend of
Maynard Keynes and
husband of Virginia Woolf.
Nancy Harmon Jenkins
The RISE AND FALL
OF THE GREAT EMPIRES
Andrew Taylor
HB. Was $45. Now $19.95
Andrew Taylor provides lucid
and elegant descriptions
of individual empires,
characterising the social and
cultural values of each, and
identifying reasons for their
rise and eventual fall.
Magnifico:
The Brilliant Life
of Lorenzo De’ Medici
Miles Unger
HB. Was $65. Now $19.95
A meticulous and entertaining study of one of the great
characters of the Italian
Renaissance, who ruled
Florence during one of the
most fascinating periods of
Italy’s turbulent history.
Packed with incident and
incisive research, this work succeeds in being
both popular and scholarly.
THE Angry Island:
Hunting the English
Shadow of
the Silk Road
HB. Was $47.95. Now $14.95
London’s infamous Sunday
Times columnist presents a
collection of politically
incorrect essays critiquing the
cultural eccentricities he
identifies beneath British
society’s calm and refined
surface.
HB. Was $49.95. Now $17.95
Out of the heart of China
into the mountains of
Central Asia, across northern
Afghanistan and the plains of
Iran and into Kurdish
Turkey, Colin Thubron
covers some 7000 miles in
eight months
A.A. Gill
Rome: Splendours of
an Ancient Civilization
Anna Maria Liberati
& Fabio Bourbon
HB. Was $69.95. Now $29.95
This book celebrates the
diversity and extraordinary
riches of this great culture in
some of the finest photographs ever taken of Roman
monuments, art treasures,
cities and landscapes.
Colin Thubron
Dance of the
Happy Shades
THE View from
Castle Rock
Alice Munro
PB. Were $24.95 each. Now $12.95 each
Jewish Literacy
Joseph Telushkin
HB. Was $39.95. Now $24.95
Telushkin ranges through all
of Jewish history and
literature to extract the
enduring facts, ideas and
stories one needs to know in
order to be a well-informed,
modern Jew.
Alice Munro recently won the International
Man Booker Prize. The judges said: ‘Alice
Munro is mostly known as a short story
writer and yet she brings as much depth,
wisdom and precision to every story as most
novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.’
Here are two of her brilliant collections.
Books
Larry McMurtry
HB. Was $48. Now $15.95
In this work of extraordinary
charm, grace and good
humor, McMurtry recounts
his life as both a reader and a
writer, how the countless
books he has read worked to
form his literary tastes, while
giving us a lively look at the
eccentrics who collect, sell or simply lust
after rare volumes.
Rome 1960:
The Olympics that
Changed the World
David Maraniss
HB. Was $53.95. Now $16.95
Rome saw the first doping
scandal, the first commercially
televised Summer Games, the
first athlete paid for wearing a
certain brand of shoes. In the
heat of the Cold War, every
move was judged for its
propaganda value. Using the
meticulous research and sweeping narrative
style that have become his trademark,
Maraniss tells the story of Rome, 1960.
Caravaggio:
Painter of Miracles
Francine Prose
HB. Was $39.95. Now $16.95
Renowned writer Francine
Prose presents the brief but
tumultuous life of one of the
greatest of all painters with
passion and acute sensitivity.
FREE EXHIBITION
STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA
THE BOOKTO-FILM
CLUB
See the big-screen adaptations of
three great Victorian books.
The Getting of Wisdom
Thurs 2 July, 6pm
Introduced by The Age film critic
Philippa Hawker.
(PG, 98mins, courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment)
--------------------------------
Monkey Grip
Thurs 16 July, 6pm
Venue: State Library of Victoria,
328 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Introduced by film critic and academic
Brian McFarlane.
(Use Entry 3, La Trobe Street, for
Monkey Grip and Reading by Design)
(M, 101mins, courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment)
Bookings: 03 8664 7099,
[email protected] or
online at slv.vic.gov.au/goto/
whatson
--------------------------------
Thurs 23 July, 6pm
These events complement the
free exhibition The Independent
Type, which celebrates Victoria’s
rich and diverse literary history.
Exhibition open 10am–5pm daily
(to 9pm Thursdays)
until 25 October 2009
slv.vic.gov.au/goto/independent-type
Subscribe to the State Library’s
monthly e-newsletter at
slv.vic.gov.au/goto/newsletter
Romulus, My Father
Introduced by Brian McFarlane.
(MA, 100mins, courtesy of Arenafilm and Footprints Film)
Complimentary refreshments provided.
READING
BY DESIGN
Thurs 16 July, 1–2pm
Hear about current directions in Australian
book design, with Miegunyah Press Publisher
Tracy O’Shaughnessy, award-winning book
designers Mary Callahan and Trisha Garner,
and Stephen Banham of Letterbox.
Presented in association with the State of Design Festival.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------PRESENTED BY
This project is supported by the Victorian Government
through Arts Victoria’s Major Touring Initiative
Ghost Town
New Release DVDs
DVD OF THE MONTH
Love The Beast
Duplicity
Released 15 July. DVD $34.95
What if you were a Hollywood movie star with an
obsession for cars and racing?
You would probably read
every script with even the
tiniest link to the subject
matter, in the hope that you
could tell a great car story of
the likes of Grand Prix, Le Mans or Mad
Max. Then one day you happen to open
your garage door and sitting there, right in
front of you, was the film you had been
searching for. This is what happened to Eric
Bana and this time around, the co-star is
his very own Ford GT Falcon Coupe
– THE BEAST. He set about documenting
his own 25-year-long love story. A simple
tale of one man’s ongoing relationship with
his very first car.
A Film With Me In It
One death is an accident.
Two are a coincidence. Three
and a dead dog, well, that’s
just bad DIY. In this
coal-black farce, the luck of
the Irish is dreadful. Indolent
actor Mark and his neighbour, failed film writer and
failed recovering alcoholic Pierce, are
wastrels with no lives. But they quickly
become the only characters left alive after a
series of accidental deaths in the ill-repaired
house they share. Hiding the bodies has
rarely been so bleakly hilarious.
Released 22 July. DVD $44.95. Bluray $49.95
Outwit. Outspy. Outsmart.
Outplay. Then get out. CIA
officer Claire Stenwick and
MI6 agent Ray Koval have
left the world of government
intelligence to cash in on the
highly profitable Cold War
raging between two rival
multinational corporations. As they each try
to stay one double-cross ahead, their schemes
are endangered by the only thing they can’t
cheat their way out of: love.
A Complete History
Of My Sexual Failures
Dumped and despondent
over an endless string of
disastrous relationships,
filmmaker Chris Waitt
attempts to root out the
source of his romantic woes
by asking each of his
ex-girlfriends point-blank
about his shortcomings as a boyfriend.
Grocers' Son
DVD $29.95
In the French summer,
30-year-old Antoine is forced
to leave Paris to return to
Provence. His father is ill, so
he takes over the family
grocery cart, driving from
village to village, delivering
supplies to the few remaining
inhabitants. Accompanied by Claire, a friend
from Paris, Antoine warms up to his experience in the hills and his encounters with the
villagers; their joie de vivre contagious.
You, The Living
DVD $29.95
Hypnotic and darkly
humorous, You, The Living is
a uniquely Scandinavian take
on the absurdities of life.
Expertly shot and whimsically
written, the movie traces a
series of bizarre, deadpan and
comic vignettes that wryly
address the meaning (or lack thereof) of life.
This is sure to be an instant cult classic.
DVD $39.95. Bluray $49.95
Bertram Pincus (Ricky
Gervais) is a man whose
people skills leave much to
be desired. When Pincus dies
unexpectedly, but is miraculously revived after seven
minutes, he wakes up to
discover that he now has the
annoying ability to see ghosts. Even worse,
they all want something from him, particularly Greg Kinnear, who pesters him into
breaking up the impending marriage of his
widow Téa Leoni.
Appaloosa
A life misunderestimated.
How did this improbable
character transform himself
into the leader of the free
world? W. is the profoundly
American story of George W.
Bush, a man who wrestled
with his personal demons in
the long shadow of his father, found God at
40 and made an incredible turnaround that
ultimately led him to the White House.
Virgil and Everett are
itinerant lawmen, hired as
marshal and deputy. The city
fathers of Appaloosa hire
them after Randall Bragg
disrupts commerce and kills
three local lawmen. They
contrive to arrest Bragg and
bring him to trial, but hanging him proves
difficult. Meanwhile, a widow has arrived in
town and Virgil falls hard. It seems mutual,
but there may be more to this woman than
meets the eye. Stars Viggo Mortensen, Ed
Harris and Renee Zellweger.
Frozen River
Polyester
W.
Life in Massena is as harsh
and barren as the frigid
landscape. In this bleak
terrain, two hardened single
mothers are trying to make
lives for their children. Faced
with little opportunity to
make ends meet, Ray and
Lila embark on an illegal venture transporting immigrants into the US. When circumstances spiral out of control, the two women
must make life or death decisions based on
their friendship and love for their children.
DVD $14.95
Francine Fishpaw is a 300
pound alcoholic with two
delinquent children. Her
husband the local pornographer, dishes out public abuse.
Francine’s life is a living hell
until her best friend, tells her
to get over her ‘itty bitty
problem’. She takes this advice, leading her to
the dashing Todd Tomorrow, with whom she
begins a torrid affair. John Waters delivers
another hilarious black comedy, replete with
bad taste and shocking humour.
WELLES
“I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that.
Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves.
Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you.”
Orson Welles
An intricate, witty and entertaining excursion into the
exposition of truth, which may or may not ring true...
Influential Cinema from Around the Globe
DIRECTORSSUITE.COM.AU
Readings Bookshop at the State Library is Now Open
A new shop in the foyer of the State Library; the best of Melbourne’s great bookshop in a compact version !
328 Swanston Street. Ph. 8664 7540 ~ Open 7 Days ~ Mon - Thurs 10 am - 6pm, Fri - Sun 10 am - 5.30pm.
Bookshop at the State Library
Welcome to
the Dollhouse
‘Weinerdog’, 12-year-old
Dawn Wiener, is taunted,
harassed and ridiculed by
everyone: her peers, teachers,
siblings and parents. With a
bad personality, unfortunate
looks and zero fashion sense,
it is difficult to like her. This
bitter black comedy is cruel in its humour.
While laughing at the underdog, it accurately
accounts the horrors of pre-teen agony.
Welcome to the Dollhouse is definitely one of
the best coming-of-age comedies ever made
and this is its first DVD release in Australia.
Louis Malle:
Youth And Conflict
This collectors’ triple-pack
compiles Le Souffle Au Coeur,
Lacombe Lucien and Au Revoir
Les Enfants. In Malle: The
Early Years, the director's skills
were developing, whereas
later, as a more confident
director, he made more
autobiographical films – about youth and the
moral choices that litter the pre-adult years.
JCVD
DVD $39.95
Between his tax problem and
his legal battle with his wife
for the custody of his
daughter, these are hard
times for the action star who
finds that even Steven Seagal
has pinched a role from him!
In JCVD, Jean-Claude Van
Damme returns to the country of his birth
to seek the peace and tranquillity he can no
longer enjoy in the United States.
True Blood:
Season One
DVD $59.95. Bluray $79.95
True Blood is set in Louisiana’s
Bon Temps, in an alternate
future where vampires have
‘come out of the coffin’.
Waitress Sookie (Anna
Paquin) keeps a dangerous
secret: she has the ability to
hear others’ thoughts. When
her bar gets its first vampire patron, 173-year
old Bill Compton – the two outsiders are
immediately drawn to each other. True Blood
is a dark and sexy tale of the Deep South
from Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball.
The Tale Of Despereaux
DVD $39.95. Bluray $49.95
The story of a brave and virtuous mouse with comically
oversized ears who dreams of
becoming a knight. Set in the
far away kingdom of Dor, this
magical fable harkens back to
a time of honour and chivalry.
Pete Seeger:
Live In Australia 1963
DVD $34.95
Alfred Hitchcock
Presents: Complete
First Season
Alfred Hitchcock plays host
to mystery, murder and
mayhem in the first season
of his iconic television series,
which premiered in 1955
and was helmed by the
master of suspense himself.
Breaking Bad: Complete First Season
Walter is a down-on-his-luck
chemistry teacher, struggling
to make ends meet for his
wife and physically challenged son, when he receives
a startling diagnosis: terminal
lung cancer. With nothing to
lose, Walter uses his training
as a chemist to cook and sell crystal meth.
As his status grows, so do his lies, but Walt
will stop at nothing to make sure his family
is taken care of after he’s gone.
This DVD not only presents
a full concert, filmed in
Melbourne in 1963, but
also includes 55 minutes
of bonus footage from
various other Australian
television appearances.
Leonard Cohen:
Under Review 1978-2006
Conditions
Temper Trap
Normally $29.95. Our Special Price: $21.95
After causing a stir on
Australian radio late last
year with their single Sweet
Disposition, Melbourne’s
own indie-rockers The
Temper Trap have delivered
a seriously slick and accomplished debut
long-player in Conditions. This is a solid
batch of tunes. Indeed, any one of them
could have been chosen as a single, such is
the credit on offer. Expect soaring U2-esque
guitars, huge choruses, airtight rhythm
section and even a sprinkling of Arcade
Fire-style sing-a-long on stand-out track
Down River. The band prove they’re not just
about stadium rock though, with beautifully
stripped-back Soldier On and gentle
mid-tempo Fools providing the perfect foil
to the more layered approach taken on rockers such as Fader, with its insanely catchy
‘woo-hoo’ chorus. I’d expect The Temper
Trap to be Australia’s next big export.
Jump on board while they’re still ours!
Matt Shurgold drives the Readings van
Further Complications
Jarvis Cocker
$25.95
This is Jarvis’s second solo
album since his departure
from the legendary band
Pulp and its eclectic blend
of pop, loud ‘n’ loose rock
and disco makes it a very
compelling listen! Pulp fan’s will be appeased
by songs such as Leftovers, I Never Said I Was
Deep and Slush and pleasantly surprised by his
more experimental numbers. In Caucasian
Blues, we find Jarvis borrowing from Johnny
Rotten’s brash lyrical delivery in Anarchy in
the UK, while the stuttering, echoey vocals
in Pilchard are strongly reminiscent of those
in Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control. A highly
entertaining and energetic album that is
well worth a listen!
Miranda La Fleur
The Eternal
Sonic Youth
$24.95
Ah, sheer delight. Just
when you thought that
rock ‘n’ roll in the twentyfirst-century may be a
slipping into an ever-stultifying morass of MTV
banality, here come the vanguard of the old
new guard, Sonic Youth, raising the bar, and
playing ‘pop the avant’ with the tired old
rock dog. Anyone who saw the band tour
here last year would testify that they are
on a roll, and playing as powerfully and
passionately as they were 20 years ago.
The Eternal is arguably the best disc Sonic
Youth have delivered since 1992’s Dirty.
Maybe adding a new member (bassist Mark
Ibold, ex-Pavement), has freed up the line
up, and kicked things up a notch, but from
the moment the first track, Sacred Trickster,
jumps out the gate, the race is on. That
traditional Youth sound of power-kick
rhythm, and a hallucinatory wash of guitar
haze and shriek takes hold, and you know
it’s safe to walk the drains again.
Garry Mansfield is from Readings Carlton
Louis Malle:
YOUTH AND CONFLICT
Louis Malle remains one of the most well-loved, and well-regarded
French film makers from the 1960s right through to the 1990s. This
collector’s triple-pack compiles Le Souffle Au Coeur, Lacombe Lucien
and Au Revoir, les Enfants. In “Malle: The Early Years” the director’s
skills were developing. Later on, a more confident director, he began
to make more autobiographical films. Films about youth, and the
moral choices that litter the pre-adult years.
LE SOUFFLÉ AU COEUR - LACOMBE
LUCIEN - AU REVOIR, LES ENFANTS
3xDVD OUT NOW
“The best teen movie since Donnie Darko”
VILLAGE VOICE
26 June. DVD $14.95
Between 1978 and 2006 Cohen created
some of his best-loved and most
influential songs. This highly informative
documentary is packed with rare performance footage, studio recordings, rarelyseen photos and interviews.
Ben is different. He has
Asperger Syndrome.
His life is a universe to
itself, where he plays his
favourite online computer
game ‘Archlord’ avidly,
trying hard to train himself
for the real world he lives in.
The harsh world of school is
for him a daily kind of hell.
As the horror of being a
daily subject to bullying
grows, ben devises a plan.
Then Scarlite comes into
his life, the girl he met
in his on-line game. That
wasn’t part of the plan...
Kids' DVD Bargains
2 July – 5 August.
DVDs $14.95 and $16.95
Titles include Wiggles: Here
Comes The Big Red Car and
other Wiggles titles, Thomas
and Friends (series 1-8), Play School Nursery
Rhymes and other Play School titles, Charlie
and Lola (series 1-6), In The Night Garden
Hello Igglepiggle! and Lazy Town Welcome,
Super Hero, Hairy Maclary and Spot.
New Release CDs
Album of the Month
3 M
D ID
VD P
R
B IC
O E
X D
SE
T!
Preliminaires
Iggy Pop
$29.95
It was spruiked in the marketing sheets as
jazz, even cabaret. Surely not, I thought.
Iggy? Jazz? Singing in French? Well, it’s
mostly true – there are jazzy tracks, some
New Orleans swing, and he does indeed sing
in French on several tracks (butchering the
accent, but an admirable attempt). This is an
album inspired by The Possibility of an Island
by French author Michel Houellebecq
(‘a novel in which I found intense pleasure ...’
says Iggy). Well, it certainly sounds like he’s
enjoying himself; some tracks are a complete
about-face from the Iggy Pop we know so
well, but he can’t help but rock out on others.
For me, this is a perplexing album: I can’t
decide if it’s merely mediocre, or simply
brilliant … further listening has inclined me
towards the latter though.
Morgana Keating is from Readings Hawthorn
Wilco the album
Wilco
While in New Zealand
recording with Neil Finn
for an upcoming album,
Messrs Tweedy, Stirratt,
Sansone and Kotche took a
shine to the studio they
were recording in and, in a creative moment,
decided to lay down tracks for an upcoming
album. Back in the States, the absent Cline
and Jorgensen added some overdubs. The
album doesn’t break new ground, but manages
to capture ghosts of past recordings, yet ...
then again, something completely new!!??
There is nobody like them in the world of
OUT NOW ON DVD
music. Most of the disc gives us the impression that the clouds hovering over many of the
songs on Sky Blue Sky have lifted. Breezy, pop
tunes mix with orchestral ballads while the
six-minute jam of Bull Black Nova starts with
huge drums, keyboards and guitars before
Nels Cline shreds a killer solo. Mmmmm,
Wilco ... my stereo and iPod eagerly await
your newest creation!
Lou Fulco is from Readings Carlton
Sunny Side Up
Paolo Nutini
Scottish lad Paolo Nutini was touted as a
‘housewife’s favourite’ after the release of his
first album These Streets in 2006. To judge
Sunny Side Up on this preconceived idea
would be a crime against music appreciation.
Jumping out of the blocks with a reggaeinspired 10/10, Nutini literally surfs the
musical menu with jazz, soul and folk tunes
that sit so harmoniously together. Husky
vocals (and even a touch of ragtime!) add to
the warmth of the whole album with Tricks
of the Trade and Coming Up Easy as highlights. A wonderfully considered effort from
a young guy with a sunny future.
Ali Meehan is from Readings Port Melbourne
Battle For The Sun
Placebo
$25.95
Placebo has an instantly recognisable sound,
mostly thanks to the unmistakable nasal
vocals of its lead singer, Brian Molko, but also
due to their raw goth-rock sound. Fans and
critics were ambivalent about their last album
Meds, but Battle For The Sun reaffirms the
gritty Placebo presence. Angst-ridden melodies and dark lyrics are prevalent, however,
intelligent use of percussion and accompanying instruments, including horns and piano,
lift the tone of each tune and the result is a
fist-thumping nod to the Placebo of old. AM
Dr Boondigga
& the Big BW
Fat Freddy’s Drop
$24.95
It’s been a long time between drinks but
album number two from Kiwi soul/dub/
electro/funksters Fat Freddy’s Drop has
finally been well, dropped –and for those of
us who have waited patiently for four years,
the wait was well and truly worth it. Their
debut took first NZ and then Australia by
storm and having spent the intervening years
conquering European audiences, FFD have
clearly paid their dues and honed their sound
to razor sharpness. With Dallas Tamaira, they
are in possession of one of the most soulful
vocalists on the planet and this is nowhere
more evident than on opening track Big BW.
Elsewhere, the sound swerves more towards
tripped-out fat electro beats before returning
to the super chilled dub grooves and the always beautifully understated horns that make
their live performances so special. Featuring
guest appearances from UK soul queen Alice
Russell, the only thing that could possibly
have made this album better would have been
a summer release. Check it out and you’ll
know what I mean. Don’t resist the Drop.
Declan Murphy is from Readings St Kilda
Neil Young Archives:
Vol. 1 1963-1972
Neil Young
CD $159.95. DVD price TBC.
This is the first volume of the Neil Young
Archives series of box-sets, produced by
Neil Young himself. This series is the definitive, comprehensive, chronological survey
of his entire body of work. Volume 1 covers
the period from his earliest recordings with
the Squires in Winnipeg, 1963, through
to his classic 1972 album, Harvest and
beyond. This DVD edition contains ten
discs, each in its own custom sleeve. Nine
of these discs hold a total of 128 tracks (12
hidden), featuring nearly 60 previously
unreleased songs. There is also a DVD
of Young's acclaimed first film, Journey
Through The Past, available for the first time
since its original theatrical release in 1973, a
lavish 236-page, full-color hardbound book
that features additional archival materials, tapes
database, and detailed descriptions of the music
and artwork, a foldout Archives poster, a custom
keeper for the ten sleeved discs, and more. As a
full-blown Neil Young freak I have been waiting
since about 1992 (when I first heard about it)
for this box-set to appear. All I can say is that
it was worth the wait. There are three different
editions available: CD, DVD and Bluray. From
what I've seen, the DVD version is the one to
choose.
Phil Richards is from Readings Carlton
Bananaz DVD
Gorillaz
$22.95
Directed by Ceri Levy, Bananaz is a fascinating insider’s view of the conception
of the cartoon band project helmed by
Blur front man Damon Albarn and visual
artist Jamie Hewlett. Working in the same
London building as the duo, Levy was
given free rein to wander through their
studio accompanied by a camcorder and
in these early scenes we witness the genesis
of the characters Noodle, 2D, Murdoc and
Russell that will long since have become so
familiar to fans of the band. Having gained
the pair’s trust, Levy shows their attention
to detail as they work apart and their shared
sense of fun when occupying the same
workspace. From here, Levy and his camera
follow the pair to the stage, where they
display a growing sense of confidence and
on to a series of inane interviews and meetand-greets in America. Given the 300-plus
hours of footage available and the lack of
voice-overs or formal interview, Levy proves
his worth as a director and editor by producing a thoroughly entertaining account
of a very intriguing enterprise. DM
© 2009 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
FAR
JAZZ IN THE GARDEN
Born in Moscow then raised in the Bronx
from age seven, this lady has balanced her
Jewish roots with her second home’s culture
in a very interesting way. She’s a whimsical
and playful artist with a quirky slant to her
songs and plays the piano with passion, having been taught classical piano from an early
age. Her songs reveal an intelligent and refreshingly honest account of her observations of life
and love. If you were charmed by her previous
album Begin To Hope, then you will not be
disappointed with this.
Dan Gries is from Readings Carlton
$31.95
Stanley Clarke can lay strong claim to being
the greatest bassist of his time or any other. The solo acoustic performance I saw in the
middle of his R&B/funk gig last year was the
closest I’ve ever seen to complete mastery of
an instrument in the flesh. Clarke’s technical
facility and the demands of the marketplace
have tended to lead him in the direction of
electric funk-bass fusion, which is a guilty
pleasure of mine over the years, but this album marks a pleasing return to straight-ahead
acoustic jazz. With his old Return To Forever
pal Lenny White on drums and the prodigiously gifted Hiromi Uehara on piano, they
whizz through a set dominated by originals
that nods in many directions –bop, modal,
free jazz, funk, Japanese folk, inventing a new
musical language in the process, comfortable
enough in their virtuosity not to stick it in the
listener’s face. This is straight-up acoustic
jazz, but nothing like the standards set Clarke
could have relied on. Refreshing. RM
Regina Spektor
SLEEPING PATTERNS
Jordie Lane
$29.95
Not many artists can release two excellent
albums in under a year. Even less can call
them both debuts. Confused? Well Jordie
Lane happens to be one half of The Fireside
Bellows, who released their excellent album
No Time To Die late last year. Now, barely
eight months later comes his even better solo debut, Sleeping Patterns. Aided by
some of Melbourne’s best musicians and
co-produced by Jeff Lang and Tim Hall, he
has mixed folk and country and delivered a
fine acoustic album. His love of Dylan, Van
Zandt and Hank Williams are fairly obvious, but he is certainly not a pale imitator.
Once again, the little indie label Vitamin
has released one hell of an Australian independent album.
Dave Clarke is from Readings Carlton
VECKATIMEST
Grizzly Bear
$24.95
Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear have been making
music for nearly ten years and have slowly
become indie music’s latest darlings-de-jour.
Or to put it another way – music that white
people like (not Caucasians – I am borrowing from blogger/author Christian Lander,
a recent visitor from the US, who spoke of
North Fitzroy being the ‘whitest’ suburb in
Melbourne.) Anyway, back to the review. Last
year, we had Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes slugging it out for crossover album of the year. In
2009, it seems may come down to Animal
Collective’s Merriweather Post and Veckatimest.
Where Fleet Foxes had Crosby Stills Nash &
Young as an obvious reference, Grizzly Bear’s
influences seem many and varied. From Brian
Wilson to Radiohead. Split Enz to Sufjan
Stevens. Quite the kitchen sink, then. So if
you want to impress people on your social
networking site – claim Grizzly Bear as your
favourite band. An album unlikely to be
heard on radio (excepting our fabulous public
radio stations) and that undoubtedly takes
some getting into, but persevere – for there
are riches here to enjoy. DC
Jazz
CELEBRATING
WEATHER REPORT
Miroslav Vitous
$32.95
Vitous, a universally admired composer and
first-call bassist for Jan Garbarek and Chick
Corea, here revisits and radically recasts
the pioneering spirit of Weather Report,
the culture and genre-defying fusion group
he founded with Joe Zawinul and Wayne
Shorter in 1970. That group’s lush textures
are replaced by bass, drums, sax and Franco
Ambrosetti’s ethereal trumpet, plus the clarinet of Michel Portal on three tracks. Weather
Report was sometimes unfairly called easy listening: this album remedies that by bringing
out the empty spaces, the sudden rhythmic
twists and melodic leaps: this really isn’t the
easy crossover cash-in I was expecting. Music
that demands repeated listening, and rewards
it handsomely.
Richard Mohr is a friend of Readings
Stanley Clarke
Country
Sea Of Tears
Eilen Jewell
$25.95
Sea Of Tears is the accomplished third album
from Boston’s Eilen (rhymes with feelin’)
Jewell; a delightful collection of rockabilly
and blues tinged Americana alt-country
music. Like a less tortured Lucinda Williams
mixed with Jolie Holland, Jewell croons her
way through a solid set of nine original songs
and three covers. For those of you searching
for an alternative to Gillian Welch, Sea Of
Tears shines as the new bright light in country
music. Be sure to check out Jewell’s previous,
shamefully overlooked albums as well. MK
Folk & World
SIWAN
JOHN BALKE
32.95
This may be the most beautiful ‘world’ or
‘jazz’ release of the year, although it defies
categorisation in the manner of so many great
ECM discs. Norwegian pianist/composer
Jon Balke unveils one of the most ambitious,
and beautiful, collaborative projects in music
today. Trumpeter/electronic nomad Jon
Hassell (whose own Last Night the Moon ...
is my other favourite record this year), violin
virtuoso Milos Valent and a coterie of Arab/
Persian string and percussion players generate a wall of blissful sound that can only
be described as spiritually elevated. This forms
the perfect launch-pad for the incantatory
voice of Moroccan poet/singer Amina Aloui’s
settings of texts from St John of the Cross,
Lope De Vega, Mansur Hallaj and other mystics – variously sung in Arabic, Spanish and
Portuguese. Here is new music inspired by
Arab-Andalusian traditions, a great melting
together of styles, forms and ideas. RM
The Dreamer Eric Bogle
$24.95
The good news is, it’s another album of succinct and up-to-the minute folk songs from
one of the great songwriters – Eric Bogle. The
bad news is, it looks like Bogle is hanging
up his pen and guitar, if the liner notes and
the final track, The Last Note, a very personal
hymn to music, is anything to go by. The
great thing about Bogle’s songs is that he can
deal with big themes like war, racism and
the destruction of the natural environment
in a way that’s never depressing and always
honours the dignity and courage of human
endeavour. There are classics in the making
here. And Lost Soul, the tale of a Ngarrinderi
man who fought in World War I, is certainly
part of the esteemed Bogle canon.
Paul Barr is from Readings Carlton
Classical CDs
CD of the Month
The Celtic Viol:
An Homage to the
Irish and Scottish
Musical Traditions
Jordi Savall
Alia Vox Cat. No. AVSA9865. $34.95
Jordi Savall out-does himself on this new
release of traditional Irish and Scottish tunes.
Expertly accompanied by early specialist
Andrew Lawrence-King on Irish harp and
psalterium, they jump in and out of the
melody and harmonic accompaniment with
ease. An intensely researched recording, Savall
learnt some of the tunes from the original
seventeenth-century manuscripts, after being
inspired in Ireland at the Kilkenny festival.
Focusing on instrumental dance music for the
fiddle, he plays various treble viols, swapping
between them as needed for jigs or laments.
Recorded in a Catalonian Monastery, it adds
a soulful overtone to the slower tunes, while
the swift dances are allowed the freedom to fly
through the acoustic. Whether you like trad
or classical, this will be enjoyed by all!
Kate Rockstrom is from Readings Carlton
Classical Specials
Busoni: Orchestral
Works Vol. 1
Neeme Jarvi
Chandos. Cat. No. CHAN9920.
Normally $34.95. Our special price $19.95
Music from the Novels
of Louis de Bernieres
Craig Ogden, Alison
Stephens
Chandos. Cat. No. CHAN9780.
Normally $34.95. Our special price $19.95
This month we feature discs that may not
be on everyone’s wish list, but are definitely
worth the effort. First up is the orchestral music of Ferruccio Busoni, who was a virtuoso
pianist as well as an excellent composer. The
works on this disc give an excellent example
of Busoni’s style and under the steady hand
of Neeme Jarvi makes for a very entertaining
CD. The second disc in our specials is from
Australian classical guitarist, Craig Ogden and
mandolinist Alison Stephens. Both musicians
play this mostly obscure repertoire with sensitivity and grace. The balance between the two
instruments is entirely complementary and it’s
beautifully realised by the Chandos recording.
N.B. Both discs are in limited supply.
Kronos Quartet:
Floodplain
Nonesuch. Cat. No. $29.95
Over their 45+ albums, the Kronos Quartet
have worked tirelessly to broaden the repertoire for string quartet beyond the realms of
traditional classical music. This time, they
have drawn their inspiration from places
such as present-day Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia,
Kazakhstan, Israel and North India. Performing a series of pieces that were written
or arranged for them, the selection of music
includes an arrangement of a popular Arab
song from 1940, an ancient Christian hymn
from Lebanon and a collaboration with a
Palestinian electronic ensemble and an original piece by a Serbian-American composer.
All works are very moving and powerful and
the playing by the Kronos Quartet is faultless. A serious contender for CD of the year.
Philip Richards is from Readings Carlton.
Mozart: Overtures
Rinaldo Alessandrini, Norwegian National Opera Orchestra
Naïve. Cat. No. OP30479. $34.95
For this reviewer, classical vocal music in
any form has always been one of my least
favourite forms of music. The beauty of this
recording is that you get to delve into the
operatic world of Mozart without the singing. All pieces are beautifully played and the
recording quality is excellent. And even if
you do like the classical voice, I think you’ll
find enough here to keep you satisfied. PR
Adio Espana:
Romances, Villancicos
& Improvisations
from Spain, Circa 1500
Baltimore Consort
on this disc and as well as being an insightful
companion to the novel, it is a fine introduction to recordings of Noël Mewton-Wood.
Maurice Smith is a friend of Readings
10/10. This CD will certainly be on my list
of top 10 recordings for 2009.
Catherine Koerner is from Readings Hawthorn
Benjamin Britten:
Folksong
Arrangements
Maria Joao Pires, piano
& Pavel Gomziakov, cello
Steve Davislim, tenor,
Simone Young , piano
Melba Recordings .SACD MR301120 $29.95
Anyone with a drop of English, Irish, Scottish
or Welsh blood may experience a tear to the
eye on hearing these beautiful and poignant
performances of simple folksongs. Australia’s
very own Steve Davislim and Simone Young
are outstanding in these 24 Benjamin Britten
arrangements, never once missing a beat.
Standout moments occur in The Sally Garden,
The Ash Grove, O Waly Waly, Greensleeves and
The Last Rose of Summer, but the whole disc
is delightful. Melba’s packaging and presentation is top notch. This is a SACD/hybrid
playable on all CD players with sound quality
Chopin
DG. 2CD Set. Cat. No. 4777483. $29.95
Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires’s beautiful recording of the Chopin Nocturnes was
selected by Gramophone as the best version in
the catalogue upon its release in 1996. Pires
is a pianist with immense integrity, technique
and artistry. When I heard of the imminent
arrival of this new recording of further works
of Frederic Chopin I looked forward to it
with much anticipation. I’m happy to report
that it doesn’t disappoint. The focus here is on
Chopin’s late output. The album includes the
Piano Sonata no.3 op 58, Polonaise-Fantaisie
op 61, Sonata for Cello and Piano op 65, plus
various late Mazurkas, Valses and Nocturnes.
This is a generously filled 2CD set for the
single disc price of $29.95; great value for
this outstanding recording. CK
THE SURPRISE BOX OFFICE COMEDY HIT
NOW ON DVD
★★★★ “A
SLICK, SLY AND SMART FARCE.”
“HILARIOUS...
A SHARP AND
GLEEFULLY UNSETTLING
BLACK COMEDY...”
“...DELIRIOUSLY
DOTTY FILM...
A MUST-SEE.”
LEIGH PAATSCH, HERALD SUN
CRIKEY.COM.AU
Dorian. Cat. No. DSL90901. $30.95
With a zen-like opening, the Baltimore
Consort weave magic on this new release
of early sixteenth-century Spanish music.
A deep resonance from the featured counter
tenor Jose Lemos helps to create a harmonious blend between the classical and folk
elements of the compositions. Their tight
ensemble and flawless tuning are perfect.
Beautiful melodic lines interweave with
skilful accompaniment in the lute and sharp
percussive elements add colour and style to
a thoroughly enjoyable recording. A musthave for any Renaissance enthusiast. KR
EMPIRE
★★★★
“AN UNEXPECTED
DELIGHT AND A FILM
NOT TO BE MISSED!”
FILMREVIEWS.COM.AU
DYLAN MORAN
The Virtuoso: Music
from the novel
Original recordings by
Noël Mewton-Wood
ABC Classics. Cat. No. 4763390. $29.95
The Virtuoso is a selection of highlights from
the recorded legacy of the Australian pianist
Noël Mewton-Wood. This disc has been
released in conjunction with the critically
acclaimed novel by the same name (The Virtuoso, Sonia Orchard, Harper, PB, $27.99),
based on his brief and bittersweet life. This is
an excellent introduction to the deft pianism of this somewhat underrated musician.
His grasp of the second movement of the
Chopin E-minor concerto is spellbinding and
may well challenge your favourite recorded
interpretations of this concerto, like those of
Lipatti and Zimerman. There are some gems
OFFICIAL SELECTION
2008 EDINBURGH
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
OFFICIAL SELECTION
2009 ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL
www.beyondhomeentertainment.com.au/afilmwithmeinit
Order Form
You can also browse and buy at our secure website ~ www.readings.com.au
WINNER
2008 IRISH FILM & TELEVISION AWARDS
BEST DIRECTOR IAN FITZGIBBON
Post to : PO Box 1066, Carlton, 3053 ~ Send facsimiles to : (03) 9347 1641
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Bestsellers from June
AUSTRALIAN FICTION
non-fiction
POPULAR CDS
1. The Slap. Christos Tsiolkas.
A&U. $32.95
2. Reunion. Andrea Goldsmith.
3. Ransom. David Malouf.
Knopf. HB. $29.95
4. Breath. Tim Winton.
Penguin. PB. $24.95
5. The Bath Fugues. Brian Castro.
Giramondo. PB. Special price $24.95
6. The Women in Black.
Madeleine St John. Text. PB. $29.95
7. The Boat. Nam Le.
Penguin. PB. $24.95
8. The Lost Life. Steven Carroll.
9. A Fraction of the Whole. Steve Toltz.
Penguin. PB. $24.95
10. Jasper Jones. Craig Silvey.
A&U. PB. $29.95
1. The Brain That Changes Itself.
Norman Doidge. Scribe. PB. $35
2. Quarterly Essay 34: Stop at Nothing.
Annabel Crabb. Black Inc. PB. $14.95
3. Up From the Mission: Selected Writings.
Noel Pearson. Black Inc. PB. $34.95
4. Chanel: Her Life, Her World.
Edmonde Charles-Roux. Quercus. PB.
Special price $24.95
5. Guide to Ethical Supermarket Shopping
2009. Ethical Consumer Group. PB. $5
6. D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.
Antony Beevor. Penguin. HB. $59.95
7. Shooting Balibo: Blood and
Memory in East Timor. Tony Maniaty.
Penguin. PB. $32.95
8. Dreams From My Father.
Barack Obama. Text. PB. $24.95
9. Stuff White People Like. Christian
Lander. Hardie Grant. PB. $24.95
10. Meet Me at Mike’s: 25 Fun and
Crafty Projects. Pip Lincolne.
Hardie Grant. PB. $45
1. Leonard Cohen Live in London.
CD $26.95. DVD $26.95. Both for $40.
2. Gurrumul. Geoffrey Gurrumul
Yunupingu. $29.95
3. Together Through Life.
Bob Dylan. $29.95
4. Quiet Nights. Diana Krall. $29.95
5. Around The Well. Iron & Wine.
2 CD Set $27.95
6. Roadsinger To Warm You Through
The Night. Yusuf. $21.95
7. Confetti. Little Birdy. $29.95
8. The Boat That Rocked.
Soundtrack. 2 CDs. $34.95
9. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.
Phoenix. $22.95
10. It's Not Me Its You. Lily Allen. $27.95
FICTION
1. The Angel’s Game. Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
Text. PB. Special price $29.95
2. Brooklyn. Colm Tóibín.
Picador. PB. $32.99
3. Nocturnes. Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber. PB. Special price $24.95
4. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel
Pie Society. Mary Ann Shaffer.
PB. $23.99
5. The White Tiger. Aravind Adiga.
Atlantic. PB. $24.95
6. The Children’s Book. A.S. Byatt.
Chatto & Windus. PB.
Special price $27.95
7. The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
Muriel Barbery. Gallic. PB. $24.95
8. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
David Eagleman. Text. PB. $22.95
9. The Winter Vault. Anne Michaels.
10. American Rust. Philipp Meyer. A&U.
PB. $32.99
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
1. Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Jeff Kinney. Penguin. PB. $14.95
2. Gone. Michael Grant.
Egmont. PB. $19.95
3. Hunger Games.
Suzanne Collins. Scholastic. PB. $17.99
4. Do Dogs Dream? Ladybird. HB. $24.95
5. Audrey of the Outback. Christine
Harris. Little Hare. PB. $14.99
6. Grug. Ted Prior. S&S. PB. $4.99
7 Eclipse. Stephenie Meyer.
Atom. PB. $29.99
8. Love You Forever.
Robert Munsch. Red Fox. PB. $17.95
9. Breaking Dawn. Stephenie Meyer.
Atom. PB. $29.99
10. The Very Hungry Caterpillar Pop-Up
Book. Eric Carle. Puffin. HB. $34.95
DVDs
1. The Wire (Seasons 1 to 4, sold
individually). Special price $29.95 ea.
2. Withnail and I:
Special Edition. $24.95
3. Babette's Feast. $19.95
4. Vicky Cristina Barcelona. $39.95
5. Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities.
$69.95
6. Pure Shit. $34.95
7. Mad Men: The Complete First Season.
$49.95
8. The First Australians. $39.95
9. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve
Parts. $34.95
10. Inspector Montalbano: Volume 4.
$39.95
CLASSICAL CDS
1. Essential. Yo Yo Ma. $19.95
2. Schubert Live Vol 1.
Imogen Cooper. $49.95
3. Classical Destinations II.
4 CDs. $39.95
4. Monteverdi Teatro Damore.
Christina Pluhar. $30.95
5. Beethoven Symphonies 1-9.
Karajan. 5 CDs. $29.95
6. Bach JS Arias.
Anne Sofie Von Otter $24.95
7. Celebrating 20 Years Together.
Richard Tognetti & ACO. $34.95
8. In Principio. Arvo Part. $32.95
9. Floodplain. Kronos Quartet. $31.95
10. You'll Never Walk Alone. David
Hobson & Teddy Tahu Rhodes. $29.95
Finding time
Catching gazes
Collecting memories
Sharing forever
Imagine
&/3?X?2?&!INDD
0-

Jeff Sparrow onKilling p9

Transcription

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Readings Monthly, August 2013