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Catherine Therese follows up her memoir The Weight of Silence with a novel featuring an abrasive yet sympathetic protagonist. My mother thought Catch-22 was one of the funniest books ever written. My dad thought it one of the saddest. Things She Would Have Said Herself reminded me of their observations, careening between tragedy and hilarity.
Ronnie Scott’s second novel explores themes of abandonment, attachment and the idea of home. Characterised from the beginning by a sense of uncertainty, Shirley is a novel where anything can happen, and probably will. Names are ambiguous, sexuality is fluid, relationships are impermanent; the world is in flux.
This exquisite novel charts many different intimacies, both physical and metaphorical – intimacies of confidences and private rituals, of eating and touching, and of the public gaze and its counterpoint, the personal realm. Among its most vivid are the intimacies imparted through the work of an interpreter, the nuances of language conveying meaning beyond mere words.
Set in Baltimore in the near future, medical science is outrunning regulation and a black market of robotic limbs and implants has developed for HPM – human performance modification – servicing a willing population. So willing, people are ready to chance their luck with shady doctors moonlighting in back-alley operations.Â
Understanding authority in the author–editor relationship will help both parties in its navigation. This research argues that the perspectives through which this partnership has been viewed to date have not been helpful to understanding its most productive form. While valuable in articulating some of the editing relationship’s functions, these perspectives have limited its role and scope, doing both author and editor a disservice. Prevailing descriptors of editors are no longer useful prisms through which to view the relationship. These characterisations of editing as background, supporting roles impede the development of a relationship in which the editor’s professionalism, their expertise and ability to impart knowledge effectively leads to trust and opportunities for growth. In an ideal, balanced relationship, forged to create the best book possible, the editor and the author will acknowledge the process and engage with it throughout the edit. It is time to move beyond the question of who has more authority in the relationship, which perpetuates an infantilising culture and a unproductive dichotomy. A more apt term for the editing process is partnership in which authors, recognising and using the collaborative opportunity to go further, see the relationship as an equal one.
Why do we travel? The search for an ephemeral experience, it is transitory–contrived–by definition. We are on the hunt for something beautiful. We had just spent a week in Thailand, on the island of Phuket, my south-east Asian roots calling. Our Covid chrysalis saw us emerge blinking...
My youngest child drove herself to work this morning. Her after-school and weekend job is across town in the martial arts school where we have both trained since she was five. We have been driving across Sydney, from the trees and water of the land just north of Parramatta River, the river that cuts through Sydney opening into the Harbour, to the denser, dirtier, livelier inner-south-west for twelve years.
Though I knew the gist of the issues raised by The Mother before I began – I’d read the devastating stories of victims of domestic violence, watched the news, and thought I understood the issues – this novel still shocks.
https://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/mandy-beaumont-the-furies-and-amy-remeikis-on-reckoning-reviewed-by-jessica-stewart/ Two books released in this nascent year recount women’s trauma and silencing by men, and their rage. In On Reckoning, an essay in Hachette’s ‘On’ series, Guardian journalist Amy Remeikis documents the rising tide of women’s anger that led to thousands marching in last year’s March4Justice. In The Furies,novelist Mandy Beaumont carries that anger in a compelling story …
Continue reading "The Furies, Mandy Beaumont and On Reckoning, Amy Remkeikis"
When I moved into a second career in editing and publishing, friends told me that working as an editor might temper my love of books—that a professional eye might spy previously unnoticed flaws. I dismissed this, but they were right. Before, if a book left me restless, dissatisfied, annoyed, I would simply close it and move on. Now, I knowwhat is wrong, why I, the reader, feel short-changed.
Your Second Draft 