Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search for Wellness by Brigid Delaney | Books + Publishing
Going gonzo on wellness, Delaney undertakes and entertainingly documents her own search for these goals via trends such as extreme fasting in Bondi, yoga in Sri Lanka, an enema in the Philippines and group therapy in the bush. Her search is earnest, and she's game for just about anything, but Delaney is also unflinching in her examination of the darker side of the wellness industrial complex.
Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright | Books+Publishing Magazine
While she describes in some detail the daily grind of her disease – the careful evasion of meals, the food phobias, the hospital stints and group therapy – the work is a philosophical undertaking, and Wright confronts anorexia’s more metaphysical concerns with a poet’s precision.
You Don't Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markowits | ArtsHub
Though it’s fiction, [this book] comes at a time in real-life history when the fading lustre of the American dream – and indeed, the American empire – is felt with particular acuteness. The book is populated with characters typifying a generation of people whose heretofore-unmatched sense of entitlement is met with a profound and nagging sense of impending existential anti-climax.
A Girl is a Half Formed Thing by Eimear McBride | Open Journal
The carefully chaotic stream of consciousness has been likened to James Joyce for its expansiveness, and to Samuel Beckett for its resistance to the linear. Much like poetry, it’s a deeply moving and emotive mode of storytelling, drawing the reader in to its strange atmosphere; fluid and dreamlike, but often gruelling and nightmarish. The effect mirrors the rattling, ricocheting, tumbling motion of thoughts as they form and arise, especially in moments of turmoil; it is like having direct access to the very raw material of the girl’s thoughts.
Catherine Fox's new book explores the longstanding issue of gender imbalance in the workplace, interrogating ingrained myths and assumptions about why this problem persists.
The Sleepers Almanac X edited by Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn | Australian Book Review
Editors Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner are fearless and shrewd arbiters of the dense, fibrous space inhabited by the short story. And if short fiction takes its inspiration from the minutiae of human experience, logging, exploring and redeeming these banalities into a textured relief map of the universal, then the Sleepers Almanac X, the final instalment of the anthology, offers a bold example of what the form can do.
Your Fathers, Where are They? And the Prophets, do They Live Forever? | ArtsHub
Dave Eggers’ latest work is both a social polemic and tightly paced hostage drama – a page-turner, even – taking in the length and breadth of the modern American condition. It’s also, in classic Eggers style, a formally radical work, building complexly drawn characters from dialogue alone.
The Dig by Cynan Jones | Open Journal
"Cynan Jones’ most recent offering is a bleak and diamond-hard look at man’s relationship with nature (read, literally, as in: the masculine). Breaking with perceptions of farming life as a gentle bucolic idyll, Jones mines it for its most jagged edges, revealing a gothic, and mostly nocturnal perspective on the Welsh countryside where violence and nature are intertwined."
Stoner by John Williams | Open Journal
"The novel’s beauty is its candid drawing of this strange, yet achingly relatable character. It is not the plot, but Williams’ handling of this unusually sensitive quality that is so heart-rending. So closely are we aligned with his perspective, that as readers we feel both viscerally conscious of his flaws, and deeply invested in his happiness. The result is a profound feeling of pathos for Stoner, and it is with this intimacy that Williams is able to conjure so lucid an evocation of this mid-century American everyman."
The Young Desire it by Kenneth Mackenzie | Open Journal
In many senses, it is a classic coming of age novel, but Mackenzie draws so heavily on the natural world, delivering such clear and succinct images of the West Australian bush – its oppressive summers and natural beauty – that it also works as a “passionately lyrical” piece of nature writing, as Malouf puts it. Emotions are conveyed through the invocation of the natural world, so that the very organics of the universe seems to collude with Charles’ emotional state.
Barking Dogs by Rebekah Clarkson | Books+Publishing Magazine
Each story is a glimpse into the private struggles and quiet hopes of its residents, old and new. Strung together, they form a distinctly Australian allegory of urban sprawl, McMansions, and the plight of the aspirational classes mortgaged to the hilt.
The High Places by Fiona McFarlane | Books+Publishing Magazine
After receiving international accolades for her Miles Franklin-shortlisted debut novel The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane follows up with a short story collection, The High Places, laden with wry wit and a deceptive simplicity. The collection ranges boldly and plausibly between place, perspective and voice, to describe a human-ness that manages to be both hysterically funny and quietly devastating at the same time.
Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood | ArtsHub
Atwood is at her best when exploring toxic relationships, like conniving women who destroy men, and selfish men who take advantage of women. But her observations seem to cut closest to the bone when focused on relationships between women and she's scarily attuned to the quiet menace of the frenemy (think: Cat's Eye).
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami | Open Journal
In many ways, Strange Weather is a love story for modern Japan – the ubiquitous young office-worker drinking alone and opting out of the marriage-and-family convention. But in a culture where social lives and loves increasingly take place by proxy in cyber space, Kawakami’s candid alternative paints a picture filled with humour, hope and a surprising type of romance.
Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson | Open Journal
In connecting place, and experience with wider concepts of the human condition, Tesson picks up where the great 19th century travel writers left off, offering an illuminating portrait of Russia, and more generally, the condition of modern life.
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner | Open Journal
Leaving the Atocha Station follows gifted American research fellow Adam Gordon in Madrid on a year-long research project, “a research-driven poem” about the “literary legacy” of the Spanish Civil War. Or so he says. Adam’s real project is at odds with this neat ambition, and he finds himself lost in a maze of existential angst – the helplessly neurotic default of an arts graduate with over-developed critical faculties and the unshakeable feeling that the artifice that he is trying to escape might just be his own.