Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

is a Vietnamese–Australian writer and critic.

By this author


Culture July 01, 2023

Chinese Fish

Home and displacement sit side by side in Chinese Fish. Inhabiting multiple perspectives, Grace Yee’s polyphonic verse novel follows a family suspended between two cultures over two decades, from their resettlement in New Zealand from Hong …

Culture May 06, 2023

Anam

Anamnesis: a recollection of a previous existence. André Dao’s sprawling, ambitious debut disposes of the word’s latter half to present a buried place of the imagination. Anam, as in Annam, as in the old colonial name for Vietnam. Anam, as in a place …

Culture April 08, 2023

Cursed Bunny

The scatological and profane swim together in Cursed Bunny. Originally published in 2017, this is South Korean author Bora Chung’s first work to be translated into English. Chung takes aim at capitalism, misogyny and the social obsessions with …

Culture April 01, 2023

Musician Amanda Brown

Amanda Brown is best known for her work with The Go-Betweens, but it’s just one part of a long and distinguished career.

Culture March 18, 2023

Old Babes in the Wood

Margaret Atwood’s 2006 short story collection, Moral Disorder, opens with a portrait of an elderly couple nearing the end of their lives. He is eager to share a piece of bad news from the paper; she’d rather enjoy the last of her days. Soon, …

Culture January 28, 2023

Little Plum

Rocks and fruit are the central images in Laura McPhee-Browne’s second novel. Characters are named after stones – Amber, Topaz, Flint – and, in the parlance of pregnancy apps, fruit tracks the growth of a new life: peach, apple, banana and, most …

Culture October 22, 2022

The Loneliest Time

Carly Rae Jepsen’s latest album, The Loneliest Time, shows the millennial star reinventing her work with a new emotional maturity.

Culture September 24, 2022

The Pachinko Parlour

Claire is nearing 30 and feeling directionless. She’s come to Tokyo from Switzerland to visit her Korean grandparents, and has picked up work tutoring a 12-year-old Japanese girl, Mieko, in French. Mostly she’s walking and thinking, lying in bed playing …

Culture February 27, 2021

Feminist writer and editor Koa Beck

Koa Beck’s new book examines how white feminism’s commodification and systematic exclusions are rooted in a knotted history of racism.

Film November 02, 2019

Blinded by the Light

In Blinded by the Light, director Gurinder Chadha critiques British politics and shows the tension between racial and national identity in a coming-of-age story that celebrates Bruce Springsteen’s music.

Film July 13, 2019

Booksmart

A refreshing and often groundbreaking portrayal of female adolescence, Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart deserves to be a classic, despite its slow start at the box office.

Culture December 01, 2018

Boots Riley’s latest coup

Boots Riley has turned from music to film to raise consciousness of the need for collective struggle against capitalism, as seen in Sorry to Bother You, his satire set in the dispiriting world of telemarketing. “Unless you engage in collective class struggle, you’re not making things better. You’re not making things better by making some art that exposes the way things are. You’re not making things better by not buying Starbucks and buying this other thing instead. The way you make things better is by being involved in class struggle, which is kept out of so many films. Any rebellion, especially class struggle, is just not in that world.”

Film September 15, 2018

The ‘whiteness’ of Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians is a breakthrough moment for Asian representation in Hollywood, but even in this rom-com the cloud of imperialism and colonialism is never truly lifted.