culture

Crimson , the debut novel by Niviaq Korneliussen, comes with an unusual preface: a letter welcoming readers to the “secluded and often unknown island” of her birth but also promising “to show another side of Greenland” to that of stereotype. Instead...

Les Murray has always been a sort of enigmatic double-headed eagle: one profiled eye looking into the past, the other staring into the future. Of course, we know, or think we know, about the backward-looking Murray, the so-called bard of Bunyah with...

“Last night I lay awake again, remembering the day the Hunt ran me down in Hulver Wood when I was just a girl.” The tang of foreboding in this novel’s opening line owes something to its echo of “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”...

There’s a scene in Lucia Berlin’s story “Lost in the Louvre” when the narrator discovers a previously missed wing of the gallery. We anticipate some revelations, but instead we get “lovely mundane objects”. There will be no miracles here, Berlin...

A. S. Patrić’s The Butcherbird Stories aims to unsettle. Each story plunges the reader into a unique scenario, enhanced by the author’s penchant for beginning in medias res. Further discombobulating the reader, the stories often experiment with...

Tom Keneally has been at the game of writing novels for a long time now. Although he has always been an uneven writer, the best of his work is made to last. If 50 years ago his Catholic Church novel Three Cheers for the Paraclete – with a hero who...

After Dark , one of Haruki Murakami’s shortest novels, opens in a Denny’s in Tokyo, where the protagonist has come for a late-night snack. The first pages are taken up by a monologue about Denny’s chicken salad, in which he explains that although it...

Toni Jordan’s latest novel, The Fragments , draws together two women living about 50 years apart: Caddie, an avid reader and bookseller, in Joh Bjelke-Petersen-era Brisbane; and Rachel, a Pennsylvania farmgirl, who runs away from a silk factory and...

Word travelled fast about cartoonist Mary Leunig’s new book. I received a text from a friend before I’d even opened the first page: “Mary Leunig has lost her mind. She hates her kids. She hates her brother. She seems mentally ill. I’m not sure it...