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Nov 26, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | James Ley |Arts Highlights
Sally Rooney inspires large quantities of what is known these days as ‘discourse’. This dubious honour is a result of her becoming very successful at a very young age, a misfortune compounded by being cast as a generational representative. She is a ‘millennial’, apparently. Her popularity has not gone unpunished. There have been several high-profile attempts to cut her reputation down to size.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
smh.com.au | James Ley
By James Ley October 22, 2024 — 12.00am, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. JuiceTim WintonHamish Hamilton, $49.99Certain aspects of Juice will feel familiar to dedicated Tim Winton readers. Its narrator is a rueful middle-aged man, separated from his wife and daughter, looking back at his life and trying to make sense of his mistakes and losses.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | James Ley |Arts Highlights
When Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published in English, there was an outbreak of what the late Angela Carter called ‘extravagant silliness’. Márquez’s novel was given a rapturous reception that focused on its wondrous exoticism, with scant regard for its grounding in the social and political reality of his native Colombia.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | James Ley |Arts Highlights
The title of Rodney Hall’s thirteenth novel, Vortex, means to convey something of its considerable formal and thematic ambitions. The implicit promise is that its various elements, however fragmented or disparate they may seem, will converge with the swirling inexorability of a whirlpool or a black hole.
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May 29, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | James Curran |Salman Rushdie |James Ley |Shannon Smith
The June issue goes subterranean with James Curran on AUKUS and the stark differences between US and Australian rhetoric about the submarine program. Miranda Johnson reports on the erosion of a bicultural consensus in Aotearoa New Zealand. Peter Rose reviews the letters of Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower. Matthew Lamb tells of the covert actions involving Frank Moorhouse and a photocopier that strengthened Australia’s copyright laws.
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May 22, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | James Ley |Arts Highlights
Memoir The perfidy of zealots, and some other writers Knife: Meditations after an attempted murder Jonathan Cape, $36.99 pb, 209 pp Memoir The perfidy of zealots, and some other writers The opening pages of Knife give an account of the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie at a speaking engagement in upstate New York on 12 August 2022. His assailant charged out of the audience and onto the stage, where he attacked the author, using one of several knives he had brought along, for exactly...
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May 13, 2024 | 
sydneyreviewofbooks.com | James Ley
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World Allen Lane
September 2023
400pp
ISBN 9780241621318 Richard Hofstadter coined the term ‘paranoid style’ to describe a phenomenon he saw emerging in the 1950s and early 1960s on the fringes of the American right. Central to the worldview of Hofstadter’s paranoiacs was a strong sense of themselves as marginalised and persecuted.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
smh.com.au | James Ley
FICTIONCaledonian Road Andrew O'HaganFaber & Faber, $34.99 Apologies to the late William Gass if I am misremembering, but I seem to recall him saying somewhere that the predominant literary form of the 20th century was the 19th century novel. The form is still ubiquitous, or at least conspicuous, well into the third decade of the 21st century.
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Jan 10, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | James Ley
I think the real strength of the internet is to remind us that although life is meaningless, it is through attempting to give life meaning that we make our greatest discoveries. Some people do that with groundbreaking music, incredible works of literature and outstanding pieces of art. However, the best people give life meaning by doing incredibly weird things online and I love them so much for that. 1. Hot Southern Baby – Cole EscolaAs a playwright I, of course, love Tennessee Williams.
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Dec 19, 2023 | 
smh.com.au | James Ley
By James Ley Save Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it FICTION Prophet SongPaul LynchOneworld, $32.99 There is something a bit last century about Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, which won the Booker Prize last month.
