My review of Gail Parent's 1972 novel Sheila Levine is dead and living in New York and Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe, from 2024, first published by Newtown Review of Books Content warning: suicidal ideation GAIL PARENT Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York; SARAH ROSE ETTER Ripe. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart Content warning: suicidal ideation Over 50 years …
BRADLEY TREVOR GREIVE and CAROLINE LANER BREURE Broken Girl
First published in the Newtown Review of Books Broken Girl, Caroline Laner Breure’s memoir written with Bradley Trevor Greive, opens with light, breezy snapshots of a young woman ready to burst forth into the world. She is cocky, impulsive. A high achiever, she has finished university in Porto Alegro, Brazil, ‘proud to be a maths nerd’, …
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One less car: cycling to work in Sydney
A year ago, I started a new technical writing contract only six kilometres from home. The 10 minute drive was bliss after years of cross-city commuting but, after a while, I noticed the bike paths which followed my exact route. I tossed the idea around but I hadn’t ridden a bike for 15 years, and …
The In-Between, Christos Tsiolkas
Reading Christos Tsiolkas is a bodily experience. Smells, tastes, touch inhabit the pages. When a character makes the sign of the Cross, there is a pull to mimic the quick touches of thumb, index and middle fingers to the forehead and abdomen, right and left shoulders. Tsiolkas’s characters celebrate their bodies – they are a source of delight, to their owners and to lovers. And he writes good sex.
The Idea of You, Robinne Lee
First published in the Newtown Review of Books Solène Marchand is a 39-year-old co-owner of a stylish mid-size art gallery in Los Angeles, specialising in representing work of women and people of colour. She co-parents her young daughter with her ex, entertainment lawyer Daniel, lives in a beautiful home, travels to Europe regularly on the …
ANNA KATE BLAIR The Modern
This is a novel to savour, its language crystalline, its acute observations tumbling one after the other. In the opening paragraph, Sophia sits at her computer terminal ‘shining the sentences’ for display labels. An Australian, she has moved to the east coast of America where she completed her PhD and now she is nearing the end of a post-doctoral fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Some bookshops may be thriving but that’s missing the point
Dom Knight’s piece on the ABC website (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-07/how-independent-bookshops-still-thrive-in-face-of-big-business/102937826) noted that many indie bookstores had been lost. Others survive. Some thrive. If your bookshop doesn’t have a loving community to support it, what is its future? It strikes me that publishing is, again, putting its head in the sand about change. As an advocate of digital, …
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Things she would have said herself, Catherine Therese
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.
Astute observations of a locked-down world
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.
Intimacies, Katie Kitamura
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.
Your Second Draft 