I have to confess I haven’t been a huge fan of the last couple of Iron & Wine albums. Despite the occasional marvellous song (‘Flightless Bird, American Mouth’) they’ve felt caught somewhere between the hushed intensity of And the Creek Drank the Cradle and Our Endless Numbered Days (apparently the distinctive whispered vocals on the former were because Sam Beam’s baby daughter was asleep in the next room) and the more expansive arrangements he seemed to be pursuing on The Shepherd’s Dog and Kiss Each Other Clean. But right from the looselimbed, sun-warmed zig-zag of its opener, ‘Caught in the Briars’, his new album, Ghost on Ghost, is a revelation: gorgeous, warm, even a little bit funky, a combination in which the more complex musical ideas Beam has been exploring in recent years finally serve to reveal his real strength as a songwriter.
For now at least you can stream the full album on NPR’s First Listen; alternatively you can check out the video for the album’s third track, ‘Joy’, below.
When I began this site part of my plan was to use it to publish short pieces of fiction, either drawn from works in progress or harvested from other published and unpublished sources. In the end that didn’t happen, mostly because the moment never really seemed right, but just lately I’ve been thinking I might start to post a few things here.
To that end I’ve just uploaded my story, ‘The Flats’, which was published a couple of years ago in the Get Reading! anthology, 10 Short Stories You Must Read in 2011. I’ve chosen it as the first one partly because I like it, and partly because a translation by Jorge Salavert has just been published in the Spanish-language literary magazine, Hermano Cerdo, so it seems sensible to have the English-language version available as well.
You can read ‘The Flats’ online now. If you’d like information about some of the other stories I’ve published recently you can check out my new Short Fiction page, or you can go direct to the source and grab a copy of my Aurealis Award shortlisted story, ‘Visitors’, from the Review of Australian Fiction or read ‘The Inconvenient Dead’ over at Overlandor in Best Australian Stories 2012. Australian (and I think, US) readers can also grab copies of my Rapunzel novelette, ‘Beauty’s Sister’ for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo, while UK readers can download it for Kindle.
At Perth Writers’ Festival a few weeks back I had the pleasure of hosting a conversation with the depressingly brilliant, charming and multi-talented China Miéville. If you’re in Australia and you’re free at 11:00am tomorrow, it’ll be screening on Big Ideas on ABC 1, otherwise you can check out a preview below and watch the full interview or download video and audio versions of it from the Big Ideas website. It should also be available to Australian viewers on ABC iView later this week as well.
Obviously being on the shortlist is pretty fabulous in itself, but I’m doubly pleased because it feels like a real vote of confidence in the time and effort the Review’s editor, Matthew Lamb, has invested in the publication. Matthew’s now editing Island (a process he spoke about recently) but in his time at the Review he helped create a space in which both new and established writers could stretch themselves and try new things, a process that’s paid off in spades over the past couple of years.
You can read the full list of finalists over on the Aurealis Awards website, and if you’d like to read the story itself it’s available for $2.99 through the Review of Australian Fiction (or you can get the whole of Volume 2 for $9.99). My congratulations again to all my fellow finalists (and in particular Margo Lanagan, whose novel, Sea Hearts, was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize earlier this week) and my thanks to the judges and organisers for all their hard work.
Oh, and the picture of the pitcher plant? If you read the story you’ll understand.
This is a little late in the day (although it’s been that kind of month), but if you’re in Perth and heading to the Writers’ Festival over the weekend I’m doing a few sessions you might want to check out.
And while we’re on the subject of the Stellas it was great to see the release of the inaugural longlist for the award. It’s a really interesting and diverse collection of books that span fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Big congratulations both to everybody on the list and to all the people who have worked so hard to make the award happen.
“With Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band finished, the group left Abbey Road at dawn bearing an acetate and drove to ‘Mama’ Cass Elliott’s flat off the King’s Road where, at six in the morning, they threw open the windows, put speakers on the ledge, and played the album full blast over the rooftops of Chelsea. According to Derek Taylor, ‘all the windows around us opened and people leaned out, wondering. It was obvious who it was on the record. Nobody complained. A lovely spring morning. People were smiling and giving us the thumbs up’.”
Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties.
If you haven’t you must see these two extraordinarily beautiful videos from Icelandic group Of Monsters and Men’s fantastic debut album, My Head is an Animal. The ‘Little Talks’ clip was directed by Mihai Wilson of We Were Monkeys and has already been nominated for a number of awards, the video for ‘King and Lionheart’ was directed by Wilson and Marcella Moser. You can read a little about the background to the ‘Little Talks’ clip on the We Were Monkeyswebsite.
I mentioned the other day I was leaving this year’s roundup of my best books until the last minute because The Weekend Australian wasn’t running its selections until today, and I didn’t want to preempt what I’d written for them.
My lists are possibly a bit truncated because six weeks of my year was devoted to reading all 5000 pages of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, a task that not only never felt onerous (except perhaps during the endless sequences in the East in A Feast for Crows) but left me howling with rage that the next part, Winds of Winter, isn’t due until 2014 at the very earliest (and let me just say that if ol’ George dies before he finishes the final book I will personally dig him up and kill him again).
I want to write something more substantial about the series at some point; for the moment I’d just say that I think they’re a pretty remarkable achievement. Martin gets praised for the skill with which he controls his incredibly complex narrative, and for the richness of his characters, but in a way I think the real achievement of the books is their capacity to make you admire characters you may not particularly like (the obvious example is Stannis, but the transformation of Jaime into a sympathetic and even admirable character is one of the real achievements of the series, as is the manner in which the reader comes to sympathise with Cersei by the end of A Feast for Crows). It’s a quality that’s made even more effective by the skill with which Martin frustrates the reader’s narrative expectations, changing the rules by killing characters you assume can’t die and demonstrating the way the actions of minor characters can throw even the best-made plans into chaos (in a way the series is really about the sheer unpredictability of political and military outcomes).
I’m not sure how much crossover there is between Martin’s readership and Hilary Mantel’s, but there are more than a few similarities between A Song of Ice and Fire and Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. Both share a fascination with the exercise of power, and with the complex and often subtle ways in which characters overreach. And while Mantel’s vision is darker than Martin’s (as books like Beyond Black demonstrate, she’s long had a fascination with cruelty and evil, in particular female cruelty and cupidity) there are enough resonances to make me wish that even half the people who’d read Martin would read Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies and vice versa.
I don’t think there’s any question Bring Up The Bodiesdeserved to win the Booker: electrically written, superbly assured, coolly subversive in a whole series of ways, it is, quite simply, a brilliant book. And I think the Booker judges this year did a good job of producing a shortlist that suggested they actually had some kind of project in mind and knew what they were looking for. But I also think it’s a pity the award’s definition of quality remains so incredibly narrow, not least because if it didn’t there would already be one standout contender for next year’s award, and that’s M. John Harrison’s terrifying Empty Space, a book that walks you to the edge of the void and forces you to look out into it until it begins to look back at you.
On the other side of the Atlantic I was hugely impressed by A.M. Homes’ May We Be Forgiven. It’s uneven and occasionally sentimental (although I suspect the sentimentality is part of the point) but it’s also ferocious and funny and quite brilliant (I’m also reviewing it so I don’t want to say too much before the review runs).
Aside from a few notable misfires, in particular the new ones from Michael Chabon, Ian McEwan and Richard Ford (a novel whose overwritten prose and deadening narrative structure seems to embody all the anxieties of the contemporary literary novel in one (very long) volume), it was a fantastic year for fiction of all kinds. I loved Lauren Groff’s vision of a failing utopia, Arcadia, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (a book filled with images such as the tide of zombies moving like a river through the streets that continue to haunt me, even a year after I finished it) and John Green’s slightly slick but incredibly moving story of two teenagers with terminal cancer, The Fault In Our Stars.
I also very much enjoyed Patrick Flanery’s imaginary exploration of the lingering effects of trauma, Absolution, Adam Johnson’s North Korean political satire, The Orphan Master’s Son and James Meek’s The Heart Broke In.
On the Australian front I’ve read a lot less than I should, but I loved Margo Lanagan’s selkie novel, Sea Hearts (or The Brides of RollRock Island as it’s known in the UK) and Chris Flynn’s effortless and energetic debut, A Tiger in Eden.
I also read a lot (and I mean a lot) of short fiction, a lot of which was extraordinarily good. The four real highlights were Kij Johnson’s stunning At the mouth of the river of the bees (if you haven’t read its World Fantasy Award-winning opener, ‘26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss’, I suggest you do so immediately), Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry (the opening story of which, ‘The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon‘ is available on Hand’s website), Karin Tidbeck’s strange and quite brilliant Jagannath and Alice Munro’s new collection, Dear Life (the remarkable ‘Gravel’, a story that seems to be one kind of story until, quite suddenly, you realise it’s a quite different kind is a textbook example of Munro’s talent for misdirection). I also loved Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her, a book of stories sustained by an internal architecture that only reveals itself in the final pages.
Two other books I loved but which seem to me to elide the usual definitions of novel or short story collection are Keith Ridgway’sHawthorn and Child and Alan Garner’s Boneland. Hawthorn and Child isn’t quite a novel in stories, and lacks the unifying architecture of a collection like Diaz’s, but nor is it simply a series of interconnected stories. Either way it’s terrific: tautly written, funny and whip smart both politically and personally. Likewise, Boneland, the final part of the trilogy Garner began 40 years ago with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, is only a novel in a nominal sense, often seeming more like a journey into the disturbed psyche of its author and the landscape that has inspired so much of his work, but it’s no less powerful for it.
If there was one book of non-fiction I wish was on the Christmas reading lists of politicians around the world it would be Callum Roberts’ account of the crisis confronting our oceans, Ocean of Life: although a lot of the material in it will be familiar to anybody with an interest in the subject seeing it laid out in detail in on place is deeply, deeply confronting. Elsewhere on the non-fiction front I very much enjoyed D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story, which provided an interestingly unconventional and mercifully unhagiographic account of a troubled life (and the title of which, interestingly, seems to have been inspired by a line of Christina Stead’s), Robert MacFarlane’s stunningly written The Old Ways and Sean Howe’s smart and superbly entertaining Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
Locally I loved Jane Gleeson-White’sDouble Entry (despite the title it’s about accounting, and despite that it’s fascinating and provocative about the significance of accounting) and Geordie Williamson’s passionate tour through the backblocks of Australian literature, The Burning Library.
On which note I might stop. I had been planning to pull together a list of my favourite music over the past twelve months, something I now suspect won’t happen, so in lieu of a post I’ve pasted in three songs I’ve been playing to death in recent weeks: Nada Surf’s impossibly joyous ‘Jules and Jim’, Band of Horses’ ‘Slow Cruel Hands of Time’ and The Lumineers’ ‘Ho Hey’. And I’d love to hear from all of you about the books you enjoyed this year.
It’s taken a while, but the Penguin Specials editions of my Rapunzel novelette, ‘Beauty’s Sister’, and my essay about Adelaide, adolescence and serial murder, ‘The Element of Need’, are now available in the UK. At the moment they’re only available for Kindle, but iBook and Google Play editions should be available soon, and as soon as they are I’ll post links. I understand they should be available in the US reasonably soon as well.
Both cost £1.99. You can buy the UK edition of ‘The Element of Need’ here and the UK edition of ‘Beauty’s Sister’ here.
If I were to make a list of my all-time favourite comic panels this one, depicting Bruce Banner caught in the blast of the gamma bomb from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’sIncredible Hulk #1 would be right up there. It’s got all the dynamism and drama of Kirby’s art at its best – there’s something immediately iconic about the image of Banner with his arms thrown up as the bomb he’s created explodes behind him – but it’s also a reminder not just of the way Cold War anxieties fed into the early Marvel comics, but of the way their imagery and grammar drew upon the legacy of the monster and horror comics of the 1950s.
So, it’s December, and although I’m still scrambling to get some things locked away the year is pretty much done. I’m going to post something about the books I’ve enjoyed most over the past twelve months next week (I’m leaving it so late because I don’t want to preempt the picks I’ve made for The Weekend Australian and The Thought Fox, although if you want a preview you can check out my picks for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, which were published last week) and if I get really excited I might do a musical round-up as well (although I’m not going to make any big promises on that score).
Looking back over the past twelve months I’m sort of amazed by how much I’ve gotten done. I haven’t managed to write much long non-fiction, but I’ve written a lot of reviews, written and submitted my doctoral dissertation and somehow managed to stay on top of all my normal commitments (or at least mostly on top).
More importantly though I’ve written a lot of fiction, some of which is even good. I’ve knocked over most of the first draft of a new novel (or novelly thing – in fact it’s a discontinuous narrative made up of ten interconnected stories), and with luck I’ll have something deliverable by April next year. Although it still doesn’t have a title the opening section was published as a standalone story in The Big Issueearlier this year and I’m hoping two more sections will be published as stories in the new year. What I’ve got is rough but I’m really pleased with it.
As well as the novel I’ve written and published a number of stories. Some – like my Rapunzel novelette, ‘Beauty’s Sister’, which was published as part of Penguin’s excellent Penguin Specials series (and is available for Kindle, iBooks, Kobo and Google Play), and my alien invasion story, ‘Visitors’, which was published by The Review of Australian Fiction – have been published as in electronic formats only, others, like my zombies in suburbia story, ‘The Inconvenient Dead’ are available online and in print (you can pick up ‘The Inconvenient Dead’ in Best Australian Stories 2012 as well as Overland 206). In addition to the stories above I’ve got another two which will be published in the new year and several more about to go out, all of which I’ll link to as they appear.
I’m also pleased to say my essay about growing up in Adelaide, ‘The Element of Need’, was also republished as a Penguin Special a few months back. If you haven’t read it you might want to check it out: I think it’s one of the best things I’ve written in recent years. There’s a post with more details about it here, or you can buy it for Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, and Google Play. And staying with the creepy theme, you might also want to check out my essay about ghosts and ghost stories, ‘Encounters with the Uncanny’, which appeared in Meanjin earlier this year. I’ve also just finished a longish piece on 2001: A Space Odyssey that I’m really pleased with and will link to once it’s published in the new year.
At this point I’m hoping next year will be equally productive – I’ve got a pile of stories that need writing and at least two novels I want to get written once this one is done – but for now I’m just happy to have gotten so much done over the past twelve months. I hope you’ve all had equally productive years.
And, finally, because it’s summer in Australia I thought I might direct you to this piece I wrote about summer and the myths of Australianness a couple of years ago: it’s not new but I like it. Or you could check out my review of John Smolens’ Quarantine, which appeared in The Washington Post a few weeks back, or my review of Ronald Frame’s Havisham, which appeared in The Weekend Australian last Saturday.
Just a quick note to say that if you’re free tomorrow night you might want to head over to Sydney’s Ashfield Library, where I’m joining Richard Glover, Debra Adelaide, Boyd Anderson, Gabrielle Carey, Christopher Cyrill and Catherine Walsh at an event celebrating the Seven Deadly Sins in literature. I’m speaking about envy, and I’m planning to say some things about monkeys, Milton, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Doctor Doom.
Things kick off at 6:00pm in the Ground Floor Activity Rooms, Ashfield Library, 260 Liverpool Road, Ashfield. You can book tickets on 02 9716 1810 or visit the Library’s website for more information.
Since it’s been out for a couple of weeks this is a little after the fact, but I wanted to say how delighted I am my story ‘The Inconvenient Dead’ has been selected for this year’s Best Australian Stories (which comes complete with a spiffy redesign). The volume, which was put together by Sonya Hartnett, also includes stories by a bunch of good people such as David Astle, David Sornig, Romy Ash and newcomers like Rebecca Harrison, and while I haven’t read all of it yet, I’m happy to report that what I have read is fantastic.
I’ve also added three reviews to the site: my pieces on Patrick Flanery’s striking and often unsettling exploration of trauma, memory and complicity, Absolution and Dana Spiotta’s stunning third novel Stone Arabia (if you haven’t read it run, don’t walk to your nearest shop and buy it now), both of which appeared in The Weekend Australian earlier this year, and my review of Peter Heller’s haunting excursion into apocalyptic fiction, The Dog Stars, which ran in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age a few months back. And while we’re on the subject of reviews you might also want to check out my piece on James Meek’s The Heart Broke In, which appeared in The Weekend Australian a few weeks ago.
And the novel? Nice of you to ask. It’s grand: not there yet but close-ish to a (very rough) first draft, which is nice.
Busy writing, which is cutting down on the posts, but in the meantime I thought I might point you in the direction of a couple of things that might be of interest.
The second is this week’s launch of issue 6 of P76. This is a project with a rather wonderful story behind it. As some of you may remember, P76 was a small but adventurous literary journal that produced five issues in the late 1980s and early 1990s before folding just before the publication of its sixth issue in the summer of 1992/3.
Earlier this year P76’s editors, Mark Roberts and Linda Adair, found the setting for this lost issue, which features work by M T C Cronin, joanne burns, Gary Dunne and others and decided to publish it as a time capsule showcasing the state of Australian literature 20 years ago. This was a decision that was of particular interest to me because the issue also contained one of the first poems I ever sold, and which, as a result of the magazine’s collapse, never saw the light of day. If you’d like to read the issue it’s available from Rochford Street Press. Issue 1 of P76 is also available for free online. My poem’s called ‘Wintering’, and it’s actually not bad.
’The Changeling'
Appears in Jonathan Strahan's Fearsome Magics. Compare prices for the UK print edition and US print edition; also available for Kindle (US and UK) and most other ebook formats.
city of tongues 