Non-Fiction
My articles, reviews and essays appear regularly in a wide range of Australian and international publications. What follows is a selection that attempts to represent something of my range of interests and the ways my thinking on various subjects has changed over the years.
Selected Essays, Articles and Review Essays
Encounters With The Uncanny: On Ghosts, Ghost Stories and Brain Science
The Element of Need: Murder and Memory in Adelaide (available for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play and Kobo)
“We have pierced the veneer of outside things”: Four books about Antarctica
A New Type Of Conversation
Some reflections on why I started blogging and the ways the experience has affected my life as a writer and my writing. Originally published in Australian Author.
The Hugo Award for Best Novel Shortlist 2010
John Wyndham and his Plan for Chaos
Growing content: a big future for little mags
Never real and always true: on depression and creativity
Also available in pdf form from Griffith Review.
The idiot box grows a brain
A piece from the Australian Literary Review about the rise of the new television.
Great White Tale
An account of several days spent cage-diving with Great White Sharks off the southern coast of South Australia, together with some reflections on wildness, and the place of the shark and the predator in the human imagination.
Bloody Beauties: The Rise and Rise of Vampire Lit
Stealing Memory’s Thunder: James Frey and the rise and rise of fake memoir
Beyond the Break: On Surfing and Writing
The Lands Within
A discussion of the allure of fantasy, originally written to coincide with the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007.
The Final Countdown
Western culture has been waiting for the end of the world for more than 2000 years. What is it that makes the notion of the apocalypse so seductive?
Bread and Sirkuses: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and Jack Maggs
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Selected Reviews and Criticism
Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow
Julian Barnes, Nothing to be frightened of
A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book
Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall
William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties
William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Lev Grossman, The Magician King
Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
Thomas Keneally, The Widow and her Hero
Frederick Reiken, Day for Night
Karen Walker, The Age of Miracles
G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
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