Skip to content

Nov 16

5 Comments

A little bit of linkage

I tend to do most of my linking on Twitter these days (and I’m a heartbeat away from setting up a Tumblr page for things that seem too long for Twitter but not really worthy of full-scale blogposts) but I’d be remiss if I didn’t direct people to this amazing series of photographs of London in the early 1880s. All photography is, as Sontag and Barthes remind us, necessarily a record of loss, but in these images of London that sense of loss is (as the author recognises) given added power by the strange absence of people from the streets and buildings depicted, an absence which recasts the city itself as a sort of memento mori.

On a rather different note, you might want to check out Sci-Fi-O-Rama, a site dedicated to SF and Fantasy-themed art. There’s usually something good going, but recent features on French SF illustrations, British SF artist Jim Burns (whose work graced the covers of any number of the SF books I read as a teenager in the 1980s) and Australian artist Dan McPharlin are particularly worth checking out.

Elsewhere I can heartily recommend both the excerpt from n+1’s What was the Hipster? in the New York Magazine, a piece which has some very intelligent things to say about the hollowing out of the counter-culture. And if you’ve not seen it before, it’s worth revisiting n+1’s terrific 2005 editorial about the novel and its place in contemporary culture.

And finally, please read the summary of an extraordinary year in climate science that appeared this week on Climate Progress. A lot of what’s there will be familiar to anybody with an interest in the subject, but it’s a piece that should be required reading not just for anybody who doesn’t think climate change is the single biggest issue facing the human race, but for every politician and policy-maker around the world.

And if you haven’t seen it, perhaps you could cap off the Climate Progress piece with Elizabeth Kolbert’s trenchant analysis of the Republican Party’s war against climate science and climate scientists in this week’s New Yorker. As Kolbert remarked in her chilling 2006 study of climate change, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, “[i]t may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” (I’d also recommend Kolbert’s excellent piece on the links between declines in zooplankton populations triggered by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the oceans and large-scale change in the ocean’s chemistry, ‘The Darkening Sea’, a piece I came within a hair’s breadth of including in The Penguin Book of the Ocean).

Nov 16

1 Comment

Another great review for The Penguin Book of the Ocean

In case any of you missed it, last Saturday’s Weekend Australian had a long and extremely positive review of The Penguin Book of the Ocean by Felicity Plunkett.

I recommend you read the piece in full, because it’s a terrific piece of writing in its own right, which tries (and succeeds) to find a language capable of responding to the pieces in the book. I’m still delighted by her description of Hakluyt’s ‘The Last Voyage of Thomas Cavendish’ as “a vertical wave of a piece”, or her recognition of the manner in which the ocean’s (and by extension the moon’s) imagined femininity underpins both our sense of its imaginative infinity and its capriciousness, or of the way the language in Wallace Stevens’ extraordinary ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ suggests not just “Yeats’s sea-compounds, his ‘dolphin-torn’ and ‘gong-tormented’ sea”, but the way that desire to push language to its limits “attests to the ocean’s mystery as well its ineffability”, its capacity to wreck and reimagine language.

And I’ve mentioned it before but I’ll mention it again: if you’d like to buy a copy without leaving your desk Booktopia are currently doing a special 26% discount on all online orders.

Nov 11

1 Comment

Best Underwater Photography 2010

Alexander Safonov, 'Hitting sailfish'

I’m excited to say I’ve just received a copy of Wayne Levin’s new book, Akule, which I’m planning to write something about next week (Wayne’s photos appear in The Penguin Book of the Ocean and I’ve written about his work previously) but in the meantime you might like to take a look at this stunning collection of photographs chosen by the judges of Our World Under Water and Deep International Underwater Competition. The Safonov image above is probably my pick, but it’s only one of a pretty fabulous collection.

Nov 10

2 Comments

Sam Twyford-Moore on sadness, madness and creativity

Albrecht Durer, Melncholia 1

Many of you may already have seen it, but if not you could do a lot worse than to head over to The Rumpus and check out Sam Twyford-Moore’s piece about writing and depression, ‘Don’t Get Me Down’. I don’t want to preempt what Sam has to say in the piece, but I will say that I think it’s both a brave piece and an intelligent one, and that I suspect a lot of it will ring true for many readers.

The piece is doubly interesting to me because Sam talks at some length about my own essay about depression and creativity, ‘Never Real and Always True’, which was published in Griffith Review last year. I’m not in a hurry to revisit the territory or the times that piece explores, but I will say how moved I’ve been by the number of people who, like Sam, have written to say the piece has helped them or spoke to them in some way: it’s not often as a writer you get to feel you’ve really touched people but with this piece I know I did, and that’s a wonderful feeling.

It’s also sort of exciting to find myself in dialogue in this way with Sam, who’s someone I don’t know well, but have a lot of time for. I’ve not read a lot of his fiction but I like what I’ve read, and as I said in my piece about literary magazines for the ALR last year, it’s difficult not to be impressed by what he’s done with the literary journal he founded a couple of years back, Cutwater. It probably makes me sound old to say this, but Sam – along with other younger writers like Rebecca Giggs, Sam Cooney and Jessica Au – makes me really excited about the future of writing: they seem not just to be a group of genuinely new voices, but to be negotiating a moment of profound cultural transformation with energy and aplomb.

Nov 7

Sherman Alexie’s War Dances

I’m off to speak at the Emerging Writers Festival in an hour or so, but in the meantime I thought I’d pop up my review of Sherman Alexie’s War Dances, which ran in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald. I think it’s fair to say Alexie is a rather bigger name in the US than he is here in Australia, but hopefully Scribe’s publication of War Dances will change that a bit. Certainly War Dances is one of those books I read with increasing excitement, a feeling that culminated with the incredibly assured title story, which is one of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve read in some time (indeed if you read only two things out of the collection, make sure they’re ‘War Dances’ and the opening poem, ‘The Limited’). With a couple of weeks distance I suspect the collection as a whole is a little less consistent than I felt it to be when I was reading it, but it’s still a very striking, intelligent and blackly funny book, and well worth a look.

You can read the full review here.

Nov 5

More Penguin Book of the Ocean goodness

Rockwell Kent, Moby Dick

I mentioned earlier in the week that I was going to be on ABC Radio National’s Bookshow this morning for an interview about The Penguin Book of the Ocean. That interview’s now been and gone, but if you’d like to catch up with it the ABC have now posted the audio on the Bookshow’s website. And I’m not sure how long it’s been there, but I’ve also realised you can read the introduction to the collection in full on Penguin’s website. And finally the good people at Booktopia are doing a special price of 25% off, so if you want to pick up a copy cheap online, they’re very definitely the place to go.

Nov 4

3 Comments

First reviews of The Penguin Book of the Ocean

This month’s Australian Literary Review features a fantastic review of The Penguin Book of the Ocean by Jennifer Moran. Unfortunately it’s not online, and I didn’t get a chance to pop something up yesterday when it was in the print edition, but suffice it to say it’s pretty much the sort of review authors (and editors!) dream about:

“Bradley has collected admirably: allusions and echoes tie the pieces to each other, building a layered and complex whole that is as varied as its subject. Like energy rolling through a wave, the shifts of pace and mood keep the reader constantly engaged.”

The book’s also just had a rave from Geordie Williamson on ABC 702, which is fantastic. Again it’s not online, but if it turns up I’ll link to it.

In the meantime, at the risk of sounding like a cracked record, you can pick up a copy at your local bookstore or check out online pricing on Booko.

Nov 4

1 Comment

Emerging Writers’ Festival

Just a quick note to say I’m speaking this Sunday at the Emerging Writers’ Festival in Sydney. I’m sure the EWF, which brings together new writers and more established literary professionals (their term, not mine!) will be familiar to many of you already, whether by virtue of their program of online events, their various Melbourne-based events at the Wheeler Centre or their Reader, but Sunday’s event, which is presented in conjunction with the NSW Writers’ Centre, this will be the first time the EWF, which brings together new writers and literary professionals (their term, not mine!), has had a Sydney presence. I’m speaking about writing for Australian and international markets at 12:00pm with Leah Greengarten and Tim Sinclair, but you can check out the full program, which also features P.M. Newton, Emily Maguire, Kathryn Heyman, Sam Twyford-Moore and Mark Mordue on the NSW Writers Centre website. You can also follow EWF on Twitter for updates about future events, online and off.

Oct 31

6 Comments

A message from the other side

My apologies if it’s have been a bit quiet around here of late: I’ve spent the past few weeks desperately trying to get the new draft of my novel done and in the week since I actually did stagger over the finish line I’ve been under the weather with some kind of bug.

The upside of all this is that the new draft of my next novel, Black Friday, is finally, actually done. It’s still not perfect, and there are definitely some gaps and problems, but I think a lot of the heavy lifting is now done, which is really exciting. I want to try and talk a bit more about it and the process of writing it over the next few months, but for now let me just say that I think it’s got some great stuff in it, and while it’s more in the mode of The Resurrectionist than my earlier novels, it’s also sharper and more contemporary, which is exciting (though I also have to say I think I’ve written my last dark, disordered novel about morally unanchored characters for a while).

The downside (and let’s face it, there’s always something) is that I managed to miss posting about the publication of The Penguin Book of the Ocean, which hit shelves last Monday. I’m going to get a few things up about it over the next week or two, but in the meantime you can check prices at Booko, or read a bit more about the collection on the Books page. I’ve also uploaded a full list of the works included in case you’d like to take a look. It’s a book that’s been a big part of my life for the last twelve months and I’m very proud of it, so I really hope others find the same pleasure and excitement reading it I had putting it together.

I’m doing various bits of media over the next few weeks, which I’ll link to as they happen, but if you’re dying to hear me talk about the collection I’ll be on The Book Show on Radio National next Friday, November 5, at 10:00am. In the meantime, as Molly Meldrum used to say, do yourself a favour.

Break text

Oct 11

14 Comments

“A country founded on the air”

I’ve always been struck by the difference in the way Australian and British readers seem to respond to the last third of The Resurrectionist, in which the narrator is transported to New South Wales to begin again with a new name and a new identity. While Australian readers seem to grasp the significance of this Australian section, I’ve always got the sense that for many British readers it seems a slightly bizarre (and I suspect fairly unsatisfying) add-on to what they see as a novel about London and a very particular piece of British history. Which is why it’s so lovely to read this analysis of it in Jerome de Groot’s new book, The Historical Novel:

“Is it the case that historical novelists may only write about ‘their’ history in so far as they have some kind of ethnographic, sociological, nationalist, geographical claim to a past? Clearly not, as writers have amply shown. However, it does tend to be the case, primarily, presumably, because of access to source material, or language problems, or lack of confidence, that historical novelists keep within their own national historical boundaries. Yet does this mean that ‘history’ is somehow inert and neutral, mere source material? Again, clearly not. However, this tension and dynamic infects our reading and understanding of historical fiction. The Australian writer James Bradley appears to have broken free of his country’s past in The Resurrectionist, setting his novel in the grim London streets of the early 1820s and specifically amongst the grave robbers servicing the various professional anatomists of the time. However, the novel inverts this for the last section, as one of them is transported to Australia for his crimes, and the novel becomes a meditation upon origin, a consideration of the relationship between mother country and colony. The inhabitants of the colony are formerly prostitutes, convicts, criminals and murderers, yet ‘To laugh at them, or mock them, however, is no easy thing, for what lies in their pasts is there for all of us. And so we conspire not to enquire, nor to tell, as if by this silence we might forget what was and make a life without a past, as if this were a land without history, a country founded on the air’. This is impossible, however: ‘And yet the past is ever there’. The Resurrectionist elegantly creates a dialogue about national character and self-definition through its historical setting, reclaiming ‘British’ history for a postcolonial audience.”

break text

Oct 3

4 Comments

Magic squids and mid-life crises

Just a quick note to say I’ve got reviews in both The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald this weekend. The first, in The Australian, is of Michael Cunningham’s rather underwhelming new novel, By Nightfall. As someone who admires a lot of Cunningham’s work (especially his last book, the gloriously weird Specimen Days) I wanted to like By Nightfall more than I did, but in the end it’s just too finely wrought and exquisitely felt to ever quite come to life.

The second, in The Sydney Morning Herald, is of China Miéville’s Kraken. Some of you may have seen my review of the nominations for the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel a few weeks back, which talked a bit about Miéville’s last book, The City And The City, which went on to share the Hugo with Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. As I said in that review one of the things that’s fascinating about The City And The City is how thoroughly it expunges the glitter of Miéville’s earlier work, and in that sense Kraken reads like a return to more familiar territory for Miéville (if a writer as restlessly imaginative as Miéville could ever be said to have a “territory” in any meaningful sense). But it’s also a much more light-hearted and playful book than many of Miéville’s earlier books, a quality which is oddly disarming at first but which (at least to my mind) means the book never seems prepared to fully commit to its own existence in some deep sense.

Break text

Oct 1

4 Comments

You know how there are bad days and really bad days?

Well I reckon news HarperCollins in the UK is in the process of pulping many thousands of copies of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom because they inadvertently printed an old version of the manuscript pretty definitely falls into the latter category. Ouch.

Break text

Sep 21

13 Comments

Excitement Plus!

Break text

I’ve just received my first copies of The Penguin Book of the Ocean. Holding a book you’ve worked on for the first time is one of those feelings that never gets old, but it’s also one of those moments when you’re painfully aware just how many people it takes to bring a book into the world. So rather than just gloat, or stand stroking the incredibly gorgeous cover, I’d like to say a few thank yous.

First up, I’d like to thank everyone at Penguin, especially my publisher, Ben Ball, for trusting me enough to commission the thing in the first place, and my editor, Cate Blake, who had the unenviable task of transforming a small mountain of photocopies and typed notes into an actual book. I’d also like to thank everyone whose work is included for their generosity. Thank you also to the friends, colleagues and commenters on this site who contributed ideas and suggestions; your input was hugely helpful. And finally thank you to the designer, Tony Palmer, for creating what is flat-out one of the most beautiful covers I’ve ever seen. My crappy photo really doesn’t do it justice, so let me just say that if Tony doesn’t win a Design Award for it next year there’s no justice in this world.

The official release date is 25 October. I’m excited.

Break text

Sep 18

2 Comments

William Gibson goes culture jamming

A couple of weeks back I posted a promotional video featuring William Gibson reading from his new novel, Zero History. At the time I mentioned I was reviewing it, so I couldn’t really say much about the book, but I’m now free of that restriction because the review is in this morning’s Weekend Australian.

Obviously you can read the review in full over at The Weekend Australian on my Writing page but in case it’s not clear on the face of it, I liked the book a lot. As I say in the review, I think both Zero History and its predecessor, Spook Country, can be at least partly understood as a sort of literary culture jamming, clever, essentially parodic attempts to expose the inner workings of what McKenzie Wark once called the Military-Entertainment Complex (if you haven’t seen it I urge you to check out Ken’s experiment in crowd-sourced cultural analysis, GAM3R 7H30Ry, published in conjunction with The Institute for the Future of the Book).

I think there’s probably a level at which this playfulness is now beginning to subvert the capacity of Gibson’s novels to do the things he wants them to do. Interestingly, the problem isn’t that the playfulness necessarily detracts from the more serious questions the novels explore, it’s that the business of the novels, and more particularly the relatively conventional narrative structures Gibson employs to play out their plots, hold the books back from really cracking open reality in the way I think they want to. I’ve said before that I think Gibson bears comparison to Delillo, but reading Zero History I did find myself wishing it would show some of Delillo’s preparedness to allow the textures and conceptual armature of the novels to become an end in themselves, or recover some of the more formally innovative qualities that make the final instalment in Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, All Tomorrow’s Parties, so exciting.

But by the same token, it’s this quality that makes the book so satisfying at an emotional level. For all his fascination with textures and technology, Gibson is a surprisingly gentle and human writer in many ways, and that quality is on full display in Zero History. It’s not just that there’s real tenderness in his depiction of the recovering addict Milgrim’s rediscovery of a larger world, or that Gibson writes with considerable empathy and acuity about addiction, it’s that he grants the reader the not inconsiderable satisfaction of seeing the heroines of Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, Cayce and Hollis, find a measure of happiness.

As I say, you can read my review in full at The Weekend Australian. But because I realise I’m now one of the few people who have reviewed the entire trilogy, I’ve also uploaded my pieces on Pattern Recognition and Spook Country (originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Literary Review) to the site. And if that’s not enough Gibson for one morning, you might want to check out the promotional videos for Zero History and Spook Country. Or visit the man himself at William Gibson Books or on Twitter. Or, if you’d like to take a step sideways, check out Gibson’s introduction to photographer Greg Girard’s wonderful book, Phantom Shanghai.

Break text

Sep 16

On blogging

Just a quick note to say my article about blogging from the most recent issue of Australian Author is now online. It’s basically a personal piece, exploring the way working online has affected the way I think about both my writing and my life as a writer, but it covers some of the same ground Alison Croggon explores in her recent piece for The Drum, ‘The Return of the Amateur Critic’, which is also well worth reading.

As I say in the piece:

Blogging has made me feel as if I’m part of something. To call it a movement is probably going a bit far, but it wouldn’t be entirely incorrect. Because like Twitter, blogging is only one facet of a much more profound transformation of the way we think about reading and writing that is being driven by technology, a process of transformation that isn’t just allowing a host of exciting new writers to emerge, but is actually giving birth to a host of new literary forms, and changing many existing ones, driving a blurring of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, genre and the literary, even the printed word and more visual forms such as the graphic novel . . . Read more

Break text

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →