Shannon Burns

The Measured Art of Love 

Tuning in to the Ovidian echoes of Andrew Pippos’ second novel, Shannon Burns juxtaposes the violence of Olympian passions with The Transformations’ subtler drama of love set in a world of media disruption, institutional abuse, and non-monogamy.

Notes of an Anxious Son

Shannon Burns reviews André Dao’s novel Anam, a self-reflexive exploration of the ethical and formal quandaries that attend the writing of family history and inheritance.

A Tour through Memory

In a sense, the narrator of He plays the role of tour guide through Murray Bail’s memories, addressing his subject’s life retrospectively while exhibiting a more intimate, but not total, knowledge of his thoughts and experiences.

The Drowned and the Saved: Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin

The work of ‘proving a hypothesis’ could hardly be more alien to Tumarkin. Instead, she is concerned with examining difficult events and experiences: paying attention, being emotionally and intellectually active, while refusing to let the conseque...

Swaying Ground: The Restorer by Michael Sala

The Restorer is dramatically immersive, thematically confronting and — despite its flaws — moving. Like The Last Thread, it is in large part about difficult reckonings with family histories, and the challenge of wresting back control of a precario...

The Writers We Deserve: Their Brilliant Careers & Wood Green

I suspect that, like me, most readers are inclined to approach any new work of fiction that explores the writing life with a kind of wariness verging on dread, but two recent Australian books prove that metafiction can still be stimulating, and th...

The Rings of Saturn: A Lasting Chronicle of Mourning

‘Rings of Saturn is not a novel in the standard form; it is part travelogue, part memoir, part essay-meditation and part fiction. It's a riff and an improvisation on found and obsessed-over material, and a close reading of place, territories, time...

Gerald Murnane: An Idiot in the Greek Sense

‘The question will arise: did I live this imaginative life because I didn’t find my real life satisfactory? That’s a question that I can’t answer, that no one else can answer. You can’t answer these questions definitively. In some respects I was i...

What it is to be human: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

The Book of Strange New Things is immersive, lightly surrealist and carefully plotted. It features well-realised characters and delicately carved sentences. The narration is more restrained and focused than in Faber’s epic bestseller, The Crimson

Monstrous Maternal: On Clarice Lispector

For those who happen upon Clarice Lispector’s fiction without the benefit of a critical or biographical introduction, or any sense of the author’s developing international reputation since her death in 1977, the encounter can be as mystifying as i...

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