Australian Book Review

1 month ago | australianbookreview.com.au | Philippa Hawker

Umberto Eco said of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) that ‘it is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand, it is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature’. It was the unnecessary length and the repetitions that appalled him most. Yet when he tried to produce a more elegant, distilled translation, he gave up: he began to wonder if the repetitions and redundancies were a necessary part of its structure.

1 month ago | australianbookreview.com.au | Kate Fagan

Kate Fagan is a writer, musician, and scholar whose third collection, First Light, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Age Book of the Year Award. She is Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and runs The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and arts workers.

1 month ago | australianbookreview.com.au | Paul Kane |Arts Highlights

At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets New York Review Books, US$22 pb, 214 pp Poetry Contemporary poets head to the Louvre ‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a...

2 months ago | australianbookreview.com.au | Graham Strahle |Arts Highlights

One of Australia’s most successful tenors and in his ninetieth year, Thomas Edmonds has put pen to paper in what might be his swansong. Ev’ry Valley: A tenor’s journey is a prodigiously detailed account of his life, and quite a marvel for what it contains. All his memories and ruminations are contained in its 313 pages, and the book is arranged in a most unusual way: by abode. A singer’s life is on the road, one might say, and this has surely been the case with Edmond.

2 months ago | australianbookreview.com.au | Nicole Hasham |Arts Highlights

For a creature born to life as a small songbird, days and nights can be treacherous. At any moment, a goshawk, a cat, or a goanna may be lurking, waiting to turn the songbird into supper. So these pretty little prey objects – scrubwrens and lorikeets and honeyeaters and the like – have developed an astute group behaviour. One bird spots the predator and issues an alarm call.