Jan 27
The most recent London Review of Books features Alan Bennett’s selection from his diaries for 2008. Nestled near the end, in an excerpt from his notebooks, is this gem of his mother’s:
“I wouldn’t want to be as bald as that. You’d never know where to stop washing your face.”
’Martian Triptych'
Appears in Jack Dann's Dreaming in the Dark and Best Australian Stories 2016
’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.
Beauty's Sister
(compare hard copy prices on Booko; also available in the UK for Kindle, and in Australia for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo)
Into the Deep: Diving into Time and Tide
The Library at the End of the World
Could bringing Neanderthals back to life save the environment?
Terror, hope, anger, kindness: the complexity of life as we face the new normal
Unearthed: Last Days in the Anthropocene
The End of the Oceans
A Family of Disguises: Michael Ondaatje's Warlight
The Element of Need: Murder and Memory in Adelaide
(available in the UK for Kindle, and in Australia for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play and Kobo)
Work in Progress: On Writing The Resurrectionist
Slippery Migrants: what eels do when we're not watching
Sunburnt Country review: Joelle Gergis on a fraught future with climate change
Maybe I'm Amazed: A New Appreciation for Paul McCartney
Made Things: Jeff Vandermeer's Borne
Strange Weather: Writing the Anthropocene
James Nestor’s Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves
The Beginning is Nigh: Caspar Henderson’s Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Encounters With The Uncanny: On Ghosts, Ghost Stories and Brain Science
Margaret Atwood's In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
Lev Grossman's The Magician King
Susan Casey's The Wave: In Pursuit of the Ocean's Greatest Furies
Ian McDonald's The Dervish House
Summer and the Myths of Australianness
William Gibson's Zero History, Spook Country, Pattern Recognition and Distrust That Particular Flavor
Bloody beauties: the rise and rise of vampire lit
Never real and always true: on depression and creativity
The idiot box grows a brain: the rise of the new television
Perfect worlds, in miniature: stories by Annie Proulx, Robert Drewe, Michael Chabon and Anne Enright
Stealing memory's thunder: James Frey and the rise of the fake memoir
city of tongues