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Culture June 15, 2019
This Excellent Machine
About a third of the way through This Excellent Machine, its teenage protagonist, Clem, finds himself in a cafe on the wrong side of town. This is a place where the footpaths are black, because “they’d waited too long to hose down the vomit”. …
Culture March 23, 2019
Exploded View
Road trips, as epitomised by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, can be a way to unfetter and unbind. Not in Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View, though, where a car is described as little more than a “moving coffin”. In 1970s Australia, …
Culture May 11, 2019
On David Malouf
“School, as everyone knows, is where books go to get sterilised,” writes Nam Le in his essay On David Malouf, part of Black Inc’s “Writers on Writers” series. But if a classroom can sound the death knell for a love of literature, Le …
Culture February 09, 2019
Into the Fire
Into the Fire may sound like a thriller or a lurid true-crime story. But while Sonia Orchard’s novel features a death and a mystery, it is, at heart, more of a tale of the ups and downs of female friendship than a whodunit. One year ago Alice …
