Claire Connelly

Jul 27, 2023 | themonthly.com.au | Kate Grenville |Judith Brett |Melissa Lucashenko |Claire Connelly

I was a shy teenager and Mum had to propel me out the door to the few social opportunities my 1960s milieu offered. When she said “But you never know who you might meet”, of course, being a teenager, I rolled my eyes. It might be a banal line, but it’s served me well. For a start, it’s how I met the man I married, the father of my children, the good companion of happy years. Instead of saying no when a man I definitely didn’t want invited me to a book launch, I said yes.

Jul 27, 2023 | themonthly.com.au | David Neustein |Judith Brett |Melissa Lucashenko |Claire Connelly

“Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect,” wrote Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi (with Steven Izenour) in their seminal 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas. While other American architects had their eyes set on the exotic piazzas and palazzos of Europe, Scott Brown and Venturi chose to sift through the kitsch of the Vegas Strip for ideas relevant to an era of billboards, highways and urban sprawl.

Jul 27, 2023 | themonthly.com.au | Rebecca Harkins-Cross |Judith Brett |Melissa Lucashenko |Claire Connelly

In French author Marie Darrieussecq’s Sleepless (Text Publishing; translated by Penny Hueston), her latest nonfiction book in a twentyfold oeuvre of predominantly fiction, she bisects the human animal into “those who can sleep and those who can’t”. As with Susan Sontag’s “dual citizenship”, describing our mortal birthright upon kingdoms of illness and health, a passport to insomniac territories may be thrust into one’s hands without warning.

Jul 27, 2023 | themonthly.com.au | Shane Danielsen |Judith Brett |Melissa Lucashenko |Claire Connelly

Korean debut filmmaker Celine Song’s elegant three-part love story embraces the Buddhist idea of encounters over many incarnations Three people sit at a bar: two men and a woman. Two of them are Korean; the other – one of the men – is not. The way they’re talking suggests familiarity, but they’re too far away (from the camera, and our fixed point of view) to make out their words; the exact nature of their relationship, therefore, remains ambiguous. Are they friends? Work colleagues?

Jul 27, 2023 | themonthly.com.au | Harry Windsor |Judith Brett |Melissa Lucashenko |Claire Connelly

Horror’s low budgets and broad church have seen a group of local filmmakers gain Hollywood’s attention Lucy Campbell was nervous. In March, the South Australian screenwriter had travelled to Austin, Texas. Her debut feature was playing at South by Southwest (SXSW), the music and film festival that has launched careers as well as Oscar winners such as Everything Everywhere All at Once. Watching her film with an audience, she tells me, she saw it with fresh eyes.