Writing, editing and proofreading services
Such a joy to discover a new/old writer! I am now reading everything by Dymphna Cusack (1902–1981) whose writing life was brilliantly recreated by Marilla North (Yarn Spinners, UQP 2001) at a recent Jessie Street National Women’s Library Lunch Hour Talk. Cusack infused her literature with her passion for social justice. Women’s rights to control …
Accidental Aid Worker is Liu's story of how wanting to help a community became life-changing. It is also an exploration of the complexities of aid, both moral and logistical.
My review of Michael Giacometti's bold collection of short stories, My Life and Other Fictions, is published in the Newtown Review of Books today. There is much to savour here. A thought-provoking gift for Christmas.
My review of Rosie Waterland's Every lie I've ever told is up at the Newtown Review of Books now.
Elizabeth Strout, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, is an author of piercing insight. Many a religious and philosophical tome has been written on moral righteousness but in her slim books, Strout’s characters show us how to live a good life.
I am drawn to writing about these books, Home, (Robinson, 2008) and The Marriage Plot (Eugenides, 2011) which portray the truncated half-life of a person suffering depression and the stress it brings to their carers. Allowing entry to those darker places is part of being seen, being understood. It’s why I read fiction.
Sometime earlier this year, I added Kent Haruf to my list of ‘books/authors to read’. I’d not heard of him before but caught some reviews of his final work, Our Souls at Night. In a second-hand bookstore in New York City (favourite destinations, both), I found a hardback copy which then sat on my shelf of ‘unread’ …
Introduced to Patrick O’Brian by a friend, I was suspicious. Volume after volume of a boy’s own adventure—ships and sailors, battles on the high seas. Yes, there is that and it is extraordinary in his deft hands but O’Brian’s genius is in taking the Napoleonic Wars as an exoskeleton, holding within it the soft flesh of human …
Travel, exploration, philosophy, religion and science in one luminous work—Peter Matthiesen’s 1978 classic The Snow Leopard is unlike anything I’ve read before. Matthiesen’s narrative follows his expedition to the Himalayas with a zoologist friend to study the bharal, a sheep/goat which has proven elusive to classification—somewhat like this book. The language both soothes and stimulates. …
This is the first of a series I’m writing to recommend some literary gems and authors I've loved. If I can help other readers find some new ‘old’ books, I’ll be repaying some of my debt to writers. Find them! * ‘When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.’ So begins Alice Sebold’s …
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