FREE JUNE 2014

BOOKS MUSIC FILM EVENTS

THE FEEL-GOOD HIT OF THE YEAR

Lorelei Vashti on Liam Pieper’s debut memoir page 4

A MILLION WINDOWS

Wayne Macauley on Gerald Murnane’s new novel page 5

THE JOKER

Sam Cooney on Kurt Vonnegut’s humour page 6

NEW IN JUNE

CHRIS DIANA CASSANDRA THE LED FLYNN SWEENEY ATHERTON GREAT ZEPPELIN BEAUTY $29.99 $19.99 $40 $19.95 $26.99 $32.95 $29.95 page 13 page 22 page 5 page 14 page 21 News

THE 21ST BLOOMSDAY IN the club will discuss Last Bets by Michaela MELBOURNE FESTIVAL McGuire, Behind the Beautiful Forevers Melbourne readers’ unabated hunger by Katherine Boo and This House of Grief for James Joyce is fed annually by the by Helen Garner. For more information, Bloomsday in Melbourne Festival which please contact Gerard Elson on 03 9525 brings together seminars and lectures, 3852 or [email protected] gatherings and original theatrical before Friday 20 June. adaptations. This year, the festival will stage a vaudeville-style comedy as part WANGARATTA JAZZ & BLUES of the Bayside Literary Series, ‘Words by FESTIVAL EARLY BIRD OFFER the Bay’. Ulysses Prestissimo dramatises This year marks 25 years of the all eighteen chapters of the novel in less Wangaratta Jazz & Blues Festival (31 than two hours and will be performed at October to 3 November) and, once again, Brighton Theatre Company, from 11 to 16 Readings is proudly partnering with the June. Also on Monday 16 June, the seminar festival. This year our customers have the component, Ulysses Lento, will look at the opportunity to receive big discounts on very particular pleasure of reading Ulysses pre-release tickets including a Gold Pass slowly, followed by dinner at The White (save up to $44 on the standard price), Rabbit Restaurant. For more information a Weekend Festival Pass (save up to $73 and to book for events, please visit on the standard price) and a Blues Pass bloomsdayinmelbourne.org.au. (save up to $45 on the standard price). Pre-release tickets can be purchased MELBOURNE SYMPHONY online at wangarattajazz.com or by phone ORCHESTRA VOUCHERS OFFER on (03) 5722 8199. To be eligible for the Karin Schaupp is an outstanding classical discount you must book before Thursday guitarist. To celebrate release of her 31 July. You can also go in the draw to new album, Mosaic: Australian Guitar win some amazing prizes by visiting the Concertos, the first 50 customers to ‘Competitions and Promotions’ page at purchase a copy of Mosaic from our wangarattajazz.com and completing the Carlton shop on Lygon Street, or online entry form by using the code: RPR2014. at readings.com.au, will also receive a $30 voucher for the Melbourne Symphony MILES OF READING CHALLENGE Orchestra (MSO). This offer is only The shortlist for the 2014 Miles Franklin available while stocks last. Conditions may Literary Award was announced in May and apply for MSO voucher redemption. features six novels that present ‘Australian Life in any of its phases’: The Narrow Road NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB AT to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan; READINGS ST KILDA The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane; My Readings St Kilda is launching a non-fiction Beautiful Enemy by Cory Taylor; Eyrie by book club in July! Running for just three Tim Winton; The Swan Book by Alexis Wright; All The Birds, Singing by Evie Readings Monthly sessions on the third Wednesday of the Wyld. Read more about the titles on page Free independent monthly newspaper month, members will discuss a selection published by Readings Books, Music & Film of books across history, politics, biography 11. The Trust Company, as trustee for the and cultural studies. Membership is $60 Miles Franklin Literary Award, challenges Editor and includes wine and snacks. Members you to read all six shortlisted books and to Belle Place also receive a discount of 20% off the RRP join the discussion at milesfranklin.com. [email protected] of each book club title. At the first meeting au/challenge.

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Contributors Lorelei Vashti Sam Cooney

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SATHE DAVETE READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 3

JUSTIN MICHAELA June Events 16 HEAZLEWOOD’S 24 McGUIRE WITH ADVICE BOOTH HELEN GARNER JOCK SERONG ON LIAM PIEPER ON In Funemployed, Justin Heazlewood – AKA In Last Bets: A True Story of Gambling, 4 QUOTA 9 THE FEEL-GOOD The Bedroom Philosopher – explores what Morality and the Law, Michaela McGuire it actually means to be a working artist in traces the death and ensuing trial of Anthony Quota is a thrilling new legal thriller from HIT OF THE YEAR Australia, and for four nights he’ll be setting Dunning at a Crown casino. She will be in former lawyer Jock Serong. Nick Batzias Liam Pieper will talk about his honest up a booth inside our Carlton shop, available conversation with Helen Garner. will launch the novel. and very funny new memoir of family and to answer all your questions on the subject. addiction, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year. Free, no booking required. Free, but please book at readings.com.au/events. Free, no booking required. Tuesday 24 June, 6.30pm Wednesday 4 June, 6.30pm Free, no booking required. Monday 16 to Thursday 19 June, Readings Carlton Readings Carlton Monday 9 June, 6.30pm 6 to 8pm each night Readings Carlton Readings Carlton LUNCH WITH KATIE SEEAR ON ENDOMETRIOSIS 4 BOB CARR JOURNAL CHRISTINE 25 Join Bob Carr talking about his 10 ASSEMBLY 16 DURHAM ON Katie Seear’s work, The Makings of a autobiography, Diary of a Foreign Minister, Modern Epidemic: Endometriosis, Gender Melbourne is a hotbed for literary journals, BRAIN INJURY and Politics, offers a long overdue which provides an intimate glimpse into the and the cultural significance/machinations Dr Christine Durham is the Victorian assessment of one of the world’s most day-to-day workings of a foreign minister. of these publications are ripe for both Senior Australian of the Year 2014. In common health problems for women. inquiry and celebration. This is the first of Entry is $30 per person and includes antipasto Unlocking My Brain: Through the Labyrinth three events on the trials and amusements and a glass of wine. Please book at readings. of Acquired Brain Injury, she talks on the Free, but please book at of steering a publication. This month, Belle readings.com.au/events com.au/events. plasticity of the brain and the human spirit. Wednesday 4 June, 12.30pm Place, editor of the Readings Monthly, Wednesday 25 June, 6.30pm Readings Hawthorn will talk with Sam Cooney of The Lifted Free, but please book at readings.com.au/events. Readings Carlton Brow, Jeff Sparrow of Overland and Amy Monday 16 June, 6.30pm Middleton of Archer. MALCOLM FRASER Readings Hawthorn JENNY VALENTISH 4 ON DANGEROUS Free, no booking required. 25 WITH KATE Tuesday 10 June, 6.30pm KATE BELLE ON ALLIES CEBERANO & Readings Carlton 19 BEING JADE In Dangerous Allies, Malcolm Fraser SIMMONE HOWELL Kate Belle explores dark family secrets in the questions Australia’s continuing reliance Jenny Valentish’s Cherry Bomb is an adults- suspense-filled Being Jade. Author Kathryn on powerful friends for its sense of national ANGELA MEYER only teenage psychodrama set in the music Ledson will join Belle in conversation. security and direction on foreign policy. 11 ON CAPTIVES industry. With musician Kate Ceberano Fraser will discuss this with author and Melbourne musician and author Dave Free, no booking required. and author Simmone Howell, Valentish will journalist Margaret Simons. Graney will launch literary blogger Angela Thursday 19 June, 6.30pm discuss teens, music and sexuality. Meyer’s gorgeously-packaged collection of Readings Hawthorn Entry is $65 for Humanities 21 members or $85 Free, no booking required. microfiction, Captives. for non-members and includes a light supper Wednesday 25 June, 6.30pm and drinks. Please book at humanities21.com.au. Free, but please book at AN INTIMATE Readings St Kilda Wednesday 4 June, 7pm [email protected] Tonic House Cellar, 386 Flinders Lane, 19 PERFORMANCE Wednesday 11 June, 6.30pm Melbourne 3000 BY GALLIE NICHOLAS J. Lily Blacks, 12 Meyers Place, Melbourne 3000 Irish singer–songwriter Gallie, with the 26 JOHNSON ON JENNIFER mighty Paddy Montgomery of Mustard CHASING THE ACE Courage, will together offically launch Gallie’s 5 SCOULLAR ON Nicholas J. Johnson’s Chasing the Ace pays ELLIE MARNEY ON The Occoquan River. BILLABONG BEND 12 EVERY WORD homage to classic swindler movies, from The Free, no booking required. Sting to Matchstick Men, and has more twists Billabong Bend is the story of star-crossed The sequel to young adult crime thriller Every Thursday 19 June, 7pm than a lower intestine. Join us for the launch. lovers set on a heart-rending collision course. Breath, Ellie Marney continues the story of Readings St Kilda Jennifer Scoullar will be in conversation Watts and Mycroft with Every Word. Angela Free, no booking required. with fellow author Kathryn Ledson. Savage will launch the book. Thursday 26 June, 6.30pm DIANE BELL ON Bella Union, Trades Hall, Corner Free, no booking required. Free, no booking required. 23 NGARRINDJERI Lygon and Victoria Sts, Carlton 3053 Thursday 5 June, 6.30pm Thursday 12 June, 6.30pm Readings Carlton Readings Carlton WURRUWARRIN Exploring the complex world of the ALEC PATRIC & TARA MOSS ON Ngarrindjeri people, this new edition of 26 ANGELA MEYER CLAIRE PERKINS & 5 THE FICTIONAL Diane Bell’s Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin will ON BEING CONSTANTINE be launched by journalist Gideon Haigh. WOMAN 12 LITERARY MINDED VEREVIS ON BAD Free, no booking required. These two literary-minded Melbourne authors Join Tara Moss talking about her first work CINEMA of non-fiction, The Fictional Woman, which Monday 23 June, 6.30pm will chat about books and reading, authors examines the common fictions that surround Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis will Readings Hawthorn and festivals, the long and the short of it all. discuss B Is for Bad Cinema, a collection of women. Feminist presenter Karen Pickering Free, no booking required. will join Moss in conversation. original essays that explore ideas of taste and Thursday 26 June, 6.30pm value in films, asking what makes a film ‘bad’. Entry is $10 per person and includes wine and MUSIC AND Readings St Kilda chocolate. Please book at readings.com.au/events. Free, no booking required. 24 STORIES FROM Thursday 5 June, 6.30pm Thursday 12 June, 6.30pm THE WORLD’S Readings St Kilda PETER EDWARDS Readings Hawthorn BEST JAZZ CLUB 30 ON THE VIETNAM We’re celebrating Bennett’s Lane and the WAR EMERGING GEOFFREY release of World’s Best Jazz Club, which Professor Peter Edwards will launch Australia 5 WRITERS’ 15 McSKIMMING shares the club’s history through words and and the Vietnam War, a landmark history book FESTIVAL & PERFORMS MAGIC photos. The evening will also feature music that skilfully unravels the complexities of READINGS TRICKS courtesy of Jazz icon Michael Tortoni. Australia’s involvement in Vietnam.

At this EWF event, Keeping Your Book As Geoffrey McSkimming reads from his Free, but please book at Free, no booking required. readings.com.au/events in the Booshop, Readings marketing and latest book, Phyllis Wong and the Return of Monday 30 June, 6.30pm editorial staff will discuss the practicalities the Conjuror, he will conjure magic tricks that Tuesday 24 June, 6.30pm Readings Carlton of working with bookshops to sell your book. will delight and amaze children of all ages. Readings Hawthorn

Free, but please book at readings.com.au/events. Free, no booking required. Thursday 5 June, 6.30pm Sunday 15 June, 10.30am For more information and updates, please visit the events page at readings.com.au/events. Please Readings St Kilda Readings St Kilda note bookings do not necessarily guarantee a seat and some events may be standing room only. 4 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

New Australian Writing

Liam Pieper’s debut memoir, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year, is about family, addiction and learning life’s lessons the hard way. Raised by bohemian parents in suburban Melbourne, a family tragedy later sets Pieper on a troubled path. Here, he talks with Lorelei Vashti about writing the truth and confronting his demons.

The Feel-Good Life Lorelei Vashti interviews Liam Pieper about his debut memoir Liam Pieper. Photograph by Tara Nielsen he photo on the cover of The and any magician will tell you it’s not Feel-Good Hit of the Year is about getting the audience to watch the of a boy who looks like he’s clever thing you’re doing, it’s about getting The demarcation between ‘I didn’t really know what I was running away from something. them to not watch your other hand too the real-life author and the author as a doing. I thought I was just writing a book TIt was taken at Labassa, the National closely – misdirection and plotting are the character is one of the trickier elements of funny anecdotes,’ he says. His greatest Trust-listed nineteenth-century mansion same things.’ of writing memoir. ‘The Liam character inspiration was the late author David in Caulfield where the author, Liam When Pieper relates violent is a parody of himself, but that’s what Rakoff. ‘He’s a lot like David Sedaris, just Pieper, lived as a child. teenage confrontations with a jujitsu I’ve always been,’ Pieper says. ‘You know a funny, bitchy New York homosexual, ‘Dad took the photo,’ Pieper says. master, wild drug taking, more than one those Soviet Super-Soldiers who are raised which is kind of my spirit animal.’ After ‘I can’t remember it, but I assume we were dramatic arrest and a decrepit share house on a diet of war and nutrients and are the first draft was finished Pieper made playing Robin Hood, ’cause that was my he describes as ‘a little bit Kerouac, a little unstoppable Soviet killing machines? I intense revisions, seeking to bring out Robin Hood outfit.’ He points out a spot bit Dickens’, it doesn’t come across as was like that but raised in a lab for perfect the heart amid the humour by more fully to the left of the photo, where some of the unbelievable per se, but it certainly paints bohemian, onanistic self-indulgence, so fleshing out the characters of his parents antique floor tiles are missing. ‘When I a very colourful portrait of a kid from that’s what I am.’ and brothers. ‘At the beginning they were was little my favourite game was to lever the Melbourne ’burbs. But this is what more supporting characters who were them up out of the grout and slowly grind memoir writing is all about, he says. ‘When there as punchlines, rather than real them into dust,’ he says. ‘Years later, on a you write a memoir you’re concentrating characters buttressed in the narrative.’ tour of the house with the Trust to record a on certain moments of your life and the The result is a story both fast-moving walking tour for them, they were like: “We exclusion of others to service the narrative,’ ‘The cheerful, entertaining and moving, with a deep affection for can’t find any leads on repatriating these he explains. ‘Everything in the book family at its core. tiles. Do you know anything about them?” happened, but it all happened much more casualness with which What do his parents think of And I was like, “Nah man.”’ slowly than the narrative would suggest. Pieper tells stories, both the book? ‘They were just relieved it The cheerful, entertaining For every dramatic incident, there are a wasn’t shit. They raised me to believe in casualness with which Pieper tells stories, thousand nights spent at home eating pasta in real life and in his book, good writing and my mum was like, “I both in real life and in his book, makes you and watching The Simpsons.’ can’t believe you’ve sold us out like this, wonder if he often evades the truth in this The Piepers moved to Oakleigh makes you wonder if he but we’re very proud of you, it’s a good way. ‘My parents were liars,’ he says bluntly. and then Bentleigh after their idealistic often evades the truth in book.” I was just relieved they weren’t ‘I definitely got some of that.’ Pieper and hippie phase at Labassa ended, but they going to sue.’ his two brothers were raised among a stayed connected to the old world by this way.’ Pieper admits, ‘Writing the book bohemian mish-mash of Leonard Cohen maintaining a marijuana crop in the was intense, in terms of confronting my records, poetry readings and marijuana, backyard. ‘Pot smoke was our matzo ball demons, lining up all my misdeeds in a after Labassa had been converted into soup,’ Pieper writes. Teenage Liam finds row.’ Now, at 30, he seems to be at peace a sort of hippie boarding house in the himself enjoying the perks of a budding As if to make a point of this, with his past; on closer inspection it’s eighties. His parents explained to their kids career as a drug dealer – the money is the first draft of the book was written obvious the boy on the cover of the book that the pot was just ‘very special tobacco’. great and girls are suddenly interested on Hydra, the Greek island popularised is running towards something, not away. ‘I ‘Sometimes it’s easier to fib,’ he says. in him. But after a shocking tragedy as an artistic haven in the fifties and mean, that’s what happens when you buy For Pieper, the truth is also he tumbles into alcohol and cocaine sixties by artists such as Leonard Cohen, a memoir, right?’ he says wryly. ‘You pay inherently complex when writing memoir. binges before an almost Eat, Pray, Love- Charmian Clift and George Johnston, three dollars towards a stranger’s therapy.’ ‘A certain amount of – if not dishonesty style time-out encourages him to seek a because ‘I wanted to do the most – then obfuscation of some events, better life. ‘The worst thing you can do hideously bourgeois thing I could do’. Lorelei Vashti is a writer and book editor. Her preferential attention to others, elision of is approach writing about your life like Being far away from his family gave him book Dress, Memory: A Memoir of My Twenties timelines goes into any memoir,’ he says. you’re the only person who’s ever felt sad, the distance he needed and the draft was in Dresses is based on her popular blog and will ‘Storytelling is something of a magic trick, or alone, or hopeless,’ he says. written very quickly. be published in September. READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 5

New Fiction Mark’s News and views from Readings’ managing director, Mark Rubbo Say Book of the Month

What do you do when an invitation to meet a former Prime Minister arrives in your inbox? THE GLASS KINGDOM It might depend which PM, but if you’re a bit of a sycophant like me, you might press reply Chris Flynn near immediately. Random House Australia recently invited booksellers from across the Text. PB. Was $29.99 country to assemble in Sydney and meet former prime minister Julia Gillard; the occasion $26.99 was to formally announce the publication of her memoir, My Story, due out in October. The Amid the dusty showgrounds of bleak regional Australian title is perhaps not very imaginative, but it is to the point, considering this is her account of towns, ex-soldier Ben Wallace and his sidekick Mikey her three years as prime minister. As Gillard said: ‘I want to give people a sense of what it run the Target Ball sideshow in a travelling carnival called the was like to be prime minister in the broadest way. What it was like on a day-to-day basis, and Kingdom. Alongside the regular punters – ‘bored women also how one dealt with policy decisions and political negotiations.’ Gillard told the gathered dragging slouching kids and unemployed husbands around the booksellers that she had been working fulltime on the book since January, supported by stalls’ – they entertain another kind of clientele, more cups of tea brought to her by Tim – she was, she said, enjoying the experience. She wasn’t interested in the crystal meth Ben deals on the side. It’s a slick going to pick through the entrails of political events, and those looking for dirt would be operation – Ben has cooks scattered throughout the countryside and the perfect front disappointed. She noted that she is an admirer of Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of for evading detection. But Mikey, better known as wannabe rapper Mekong Delta, has Facebook, and wants her book to have a similar positive message for women, especially a loud mouth and restless legs, and it’s not long before his thirst for thrills gets him younger women, aspiring to positions of leadership in society. The former PMs address was into trouble. prefaced by a Skype endorsement from IMF chief Christine Lagarde: ‘A woman is a bit like a Chris Flynn has a real flair for language – in his debut novel, A Tiger in Eden, he tea bag; you only know how strong she is when you put her in hot water ... The waters were played with his tough protagonist’s Belfast dialect to create a uniquely authentic voice. certainly hot for Julia.’ Readings and The Wheeler Centre will be hosting a joint event with In The Glass Kingdom, the author has upped the ante, inhabiting multiple characters. Gillard in October, so keep an eye on out for more news on this. The gruff and cynical Ben, haunted by his military past, carries mental and physical scars Two other prominent women in politics have books out this year. Both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren are being put forward as possible Democrat presidential ‘Flynn plays with ideas of violence as catharsis, and tests the reader’s nominees for the 2016 US election. Warren is a former law professor at Harvard University, where she specialised in bankruptcy, particularly its impact on the middle sympathies as characters blur from men to monsters and back again.’ class. Her book is A Fighting Chance (HB. $47.95). Hillary Clinton’s book, Hard Choices (HB. Special price $32.99), is an account of her four years as US secretary of state, and is that he grimly embraces as much as he runs away from. A brief, lyrical interlude through featured on page 14. the eyes of an elderly Welsh carnie is a poignant and effective vehicle for exploring the In other news, last month saw the annual conference of Australia’s independent history of the Kingdom and its subjects. The real standout, though, is the scattered and booksellers, at which Nielsen BookData presents an award for the best regional and hyperactive Mekong Delta. Mikey talks in the affected ghetto-speak of bad Aussie hip- metropolitan bookshop in Australia. Judged by publishers, the award recognises hop, full of manic, run-on sentences and feverish reality-TV daydreams. It could be a excellence in bookselling. I was very pleased that two Victorian bookshops took home the recipe for disaster, but Flynn’s commitment to and consistency with the vernacular turns awards this year: Torquay Books won the regional category and one of my favourite city Mikey’s posturing into a reflection on the young man’s ego and scattershot ambition. bookshops, Readings Carlton, won for metro store of the year. Flynn plays with ideas of violence as catharsis, and tests the reader’s sympathies as characters blur from men to monsters and back again. Smart and wryly funny, The Glass Kingdom is an engrossing read from a skilled practitioner of contemporary literary fiction. From Alan Vaarwerk is a freelance reviewer the with a ‘dark-haired young woman’, an Australian Books Martin Shaw, older man unravelling a dark family secret. Readings books division manager And yet, for all their vividness, many of Desk A MILLION WINDOWS these images are surrounded by so much Gerald Murnane theoretical scaffolding that they become difficult to hold in the mind’s eye. There is Giramondo. PB. $26.95 a lot of literary theory here – and even the Of all the book titles I’ve ever come across, Janet Frame’s You Are Now Entering the Human A Million keenest creative writing student will need Heart remains one of my all-time favourites. It’s wonderful news then that the Text series Windows, Gerald to strap themselves in for the ride. of generally overlooked Australian and New Zealand classics now includes Frame’s debut Murnane’s latest, In his Tractatus Wittgenstein novel, Owls Do Cry. Evocatively, Angela Meyer in her review writes: ‘At the end, you are comes out of the late suggested that after we get up beyond our lying down, there is weight on your chest, but your mind is lit up.’ charge that started with propositions (let’s say for the fiction writer Turning to an Australian contemporary master, Gerald Murnane seems to be in a Barley Patch in 2009. It to the pure air of pure images and ideas) we particularly fecund period of his career, with a succession of inimitable novels appearing takes its title (and ‘must, so to speak, throw away the ladder’. in the last few years. The latest, A Million Windows, is reviewed on this page by an author epigraph) from Henry Murnane has always been one to leave his who counts Murnane as a seminal influence: Wayne Macauley. He writes of having some James’ preface to The ladders behind. Here, I think, to excess. reservations of Murnane’s latest work, but that ‘he is an artist of such rare and single- Portrait of a Lady, where James speaks of But he is an artist of such rare and single- minded originality – as well as being the greatest sentence-maker Australia has ever seen ‘the posted presence of the watcher’ at each minded originality – as well as being the – that you almost always forgive him.’ of the house of fiction’s million windows. greatest sentence-maker Australia has ever Amid the local fiction offerings is a book I would like to champion, simply because There is hardly a Murnane seen – that you almost always forgive him. it’s the funniest tale I’ve read in many a year – and we need those from time to time among book or story in existence where its the sometimes overly earnest contemporary literature. Chris Flynn’s The Glass Kingdom ostensible author is not aware of writing Wayne Macauley is the author of three is best described, I think, as Alex Garland’s The Beach meets the bush, and will have you ostensible fiction and investigating the novels: Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, marvelling at Flynn’s extraordinary ear for the vernacular and wicked eye for small-town project of doing so. What has been so Caravan Story and The Cook. His new book, country Australia. exhilarating about his work so far is that Demons, will be released in August. International fiction ranges from the sublime American short-story practitioner this self-consciousness – almost hyper self- Lydia Davis (Can’t and Won’t), to the last work, sadly, of the great Peter Matthiessen (In consciousness – has rarely, for this reader THE PLACE AT WHITTON Paradise). Not to be overlooked are two particularly ambitious debuts: Smith Henderson’s anyway, diminished the work’s readability. Tom Keneally Fourth of July Creek and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, which is But in A Million Windows Murnane seems Knopf. HB. $29.99 ‘a polyphonic novel whose scope pays tribute to Melville, George Eliot and David Foster more than ever to be arguing for an entirely This is the fiftieth- Wallace’, according to our reviewer. self-conscious art over one that allows into anniversary edition of It’s also a bountiful month for non-fiction: Shy, the much-anticipated memoir its orbit flesh, blood, heart, connectedness. Tom Keneally’s debut from broadcaster Sian Prior; nothing less than The Feel-Good Hit of the Year from Liam In ‘a certain building of two or, novel, which was first Pieper, which our reviewer rates as one of the best local memoirs in recent years; and, perhaps, three storeys’ a group of men published after his time ironically (as we slowly pick ourselves up from the federal budget), Justin Heazlewood’s – versions, we might say, of the author – in a seminary. When a Funemployed. The political tragics are well catered for, with a memoir from Hillary look out their windows and make fiction. man is found brutally Clinton, Hard Choices, which no doubt will be interpreted as some sort of signal of intent in This fiction seems mostly to be part of a murdered in Whitton’s terms of her presidential ambitions; and Rob Oakeshott looks back on his tumultuous time grander Proustian project (as all Murnane’s monastery, Dr Stenner, in politics in The Independent Member for Lyne. fiction is, in a way) and much of their Whitton’s president, is Finally, for multiple generations of Melbourne literary folk, academic and poet remembering is beautifully done: a boy, horrified. Could it possibly be the work of Chris Wallace-Crabbe has been a beacon and an inspiration. To mark his eightieth birthday, courting the dark-haired girl with ‘the zone one of his priests? Another brazen killing MUP has commissioned a wonderful celebratory volume edited by Cassandra Atherton: of warm colour around her cheekbones’, a follows and Stenner knows he must Travelling Without Gods: A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Companion. Not that Chris is showing any middle-aged man embarking on an affair signs of slowing down: his new collection, My Feet Are Hungry, also appears this month. Continued on page 7 6 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

Essays The Joker Sam Cooney on the work of Kurt Vonnegut

n primary school, I learned pretty messages can be conveyed through askew to the expectations of the overly intellectual writing was actually really quite crummy, quickly that there were two ways to and darkly funny means. literati, allows the reader breathing space in really lousy and insubstantial. find yourself lying on the playground In ‘Mr Vonnegut in Sumatra’, which he or she can flow with the current Vonnegut’s honesty with himself, concrete, holding your stomach and from his essay collection The Brain-Dead of the work, unclenched enough to look about himself, was legendary, both in his Igasping for air. A fist or a knee from an Megaphone, George Saunders, writing on into the subject matter, and thus look into books, and in real life. He was known to go older or bigger kid straight into the guts: Vonnegut, says that humour ‘is what happens themselves. There’s no better way for an around and openly grade his books in terms that’d do it every time. The other way was when we’re told the truth quicker and more author to take themself seriously than to not of quality. (You can actually see him do so by laughing so much I couldn’t possibly directly than we’re used to. The comic is the take themself seriously at all, at least most in an old Charlie Rose TV interview, easily stay vertical. Many of my school years were truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, of the time. A friend recently outlined to found on YouTube.) It is such a heartening punctuated by equal parts roughhousing the easy consolation.’ Vonnegut is an expert me – convincingly – that writers who view sight to watch a hugely respected author and cacking myself, but it is the latter that at this, often revealing important details themselves and their work humourlessly are be so candid towards his life’s work, while I remember clearly. I can recall exactly or plot points so abruptly and without almost the worst kind of people. It reminded totally having fun doing so. Cat’s Cradle, what I was laughing about in each of those fanfare that the reader is taken by surprise. me of a wonderful Geoff Dyer quote from a Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night get moments of euphoric, almost hysterical In Slaughterhouse-Five some of the biggest Paris Review interview, which goes: A-pluses, while Slapstick gets an F. glee, and how deep in my core that laughter events of World War II are described He was also noted for making lists reached, whereas all the violence blurs quickly before being cast aside in order for I’m so revolted by writers taking themselves and rules, often to do with writing. The together. Humour impacts me more than the characters to do what characters do best: seriously that, as a kind of protest, I’ve most famous are his 8 Rules for Writing a any other emotion, and this extends to my be human. Being surprised as a reader is a deprioritised the role of writing in my life. Short Story. This list is Vonnegut all over: reading preferences. wonderful experience, and in Vonnegut’s best I do it when I’ve not got anything better to droll, weird, funny, but also honest and Kurt Vonnegut understood books we are surprised at almost every page. do – and even then I often do nothing instead. true. How often the absurd and the funny the power of humour to be able to Saunders, in the same essay, writes What I really like is doing the laundry. observations are also the most genuine. communicate ideas more than sombreness of the lessons he takes as a writer from Vonnegut, in his own Paris Review ever could. For gallows humour, he stands Vonnegut: Vonnegut was always first in line to interview, summed up his approach to his in celebrated company: Oscar Wilde, crack a joke, but he was the last to consider work when he said: ‘If you make people Joseph Heller, Roald Dahl and Billy ‘Your real story may have nothing to do with his vocation as a joke. I remember some laugh or cry about little black marks on Shakespeare. This humour exists not only your actual experience. … In constructing time ago reading an anecdote about a dinner sheets of white paper, what is that but a within Vonnegut’s books, where inanity your black box, feel free to shorthand those party he once attended at the house of a practical joke? All the great story lines are and wit ran parallel in a race to the bottom experiences, allude to them sideways, or omit writer, where all the guests were writers, great practical jokes that people fall for over (a bottom, in Vonnegut terms, is really them entirely. Joke about them, avoid directly and the topic quickly moved to the daily and over again.’ I, for one, am glad he is such the top), but also in his attitude towards exploiting them, shroud them in an over-story trials of sitting before the page, and just a joker, and I will keep falling, holding my himself, as a writer, and also as a human about aliens: you know what you know, and how unpleasant it was. They all hated it, sides, cacking myself with laughter. being. ‘Literature should not disappear up that knowledge will not be shaken out of your and bonded over their shared antipathy. But its own asshole, so to speak,’ he once said, stories no matter how breezy or comic or one voice piped up, a writer who said that Sam Cooney is the publisher and editor-in- referring to both books and those who minimalist your mode of expression, or how actually, she enjoyed every minute of the chief of The Lifted Brow. His writing has been author them. Or, as he put it more politely, much you shun mimesis.’ writing process and loved being a writer. published widely, including in Meanjin, Island, ‘I think it can be tremendously refreshing if Vonnegut said that the room fell silent, and Going Down Swinging, Seizure, The Rumpus, a creator of literature has something on his Tackling weighty topics obliquely that he thought of only one thing, and he Sleepers Almanac and The Australian, and as a mind other than the history of literature so is a way to dupe a reader into confrontation believed he could see the same sentiment in founding part of the McSweeney’s Silent History far.’ Vonnegut, perhaps showing the way for with The Big Issues, even subconsciously, the faces of everyone else around the table: geofiction project. He teaches at universities in authors such as David Foster Wallace and and a writer who concurrently pokes fun at that this particular writer who’d spoken Melbourne and is a member of the Emerging Jennifer Egan, demonstrated that authentic the idea of literature itself, by not kowtowing up was the only person in the room whose Writers’ Festival’s Program Advisory Committee. Last Bets Belle Place interviews Michaela McGuire about her new work of true crime

our book hinges on the case easier to identify with someone who only done so. I found it extraordinary that there of Anthony Dunning, the ever appeared to me on a screen. could be such a gap between what was 40-year-old man who was I sat in on the preliminary trial of legally required of the casino, and what pinned to the floor of Crown another patron who had been assaulted at almost anyone would regard as the morally casinoY by security staff and who later Crown – whose wrist had been broken after correct thing to do. died. Was it important to your book to they had been escorted out of the casino by That foggy gap is what I set out establish a sense of who Dunning was? bouncers – and I couldn’t stand this guy. to investigate, and I was surprised by how It was important for me to establish a sense I wondered what I would have thought often it came up in court. On one of the of who everyone involved was – Anthony of Dunning if he had been able to give very first days of the committal hearing – a Dunning; his two best friends who were evidence about what had happened to him. sort of mini-trial before the main event with him that night at Crown; Matthew Maybe I would have believed that he had – one of the bouncers’ barristers quite Lawson, the 26-year-old bouncer who been spoiling for a fight that night. gleefully pointed out that ‘this isn’t a court decided Dunning was drunk and gave of morals’. It was fascinating to watch the the order for him to be removed from the A central thesis of Last Bets is concerned lawyers neatly step around this idea, and casino. My requests for interviews with with the gap between a casino’s moral try to twist it to their advantage. all of the key players were denied, which I obligation and the law. Can you tell us There was also a lot of argument thought was fair enough. It was a painful more about this idea? about whether the bouncers had restrained enough ordeal already without having some My interest in this case was sparked Anthony Dunning in accordance with writer stick her nose in. when I read that although Dunning proper casino procedures. It took the I encountered Dunning only Michaela McGuire. Photograph by Tarsha Hosking was unconscious when he was taken prosecutor to point out that the more through the same six minutes of CCTV by ambulance from Crown, and died in relevant issue was whether what they had the trial – with one glaring exception – footage, which I watched on endless hospital four days after he was pinned to done was permitted under the law. As the said that Dunning had been aggressive repeat as the trial progressed. I was able the casino floor by security staff, Crown trial progressed and more witnesses gave that night at Crown, that he was verbally to observe everyone else through the nine never notified the police. It was Dunning’s evidence, there was an acute sense of the abusing the bouncers, that he pushed one weeks I sat in court, either on the witness two friends who had been there on the casino operating somewhat above the law, of them. Dunning’s friends who were with stand, in the public gallery, or seated in night who made the call. Later that week, or at least believing it was entitled to. him on the night said otherwise. I worried the dock, and get some sense of who they a spokesperson for the police said that that I wanted to believe that he hadn’t were as people, but Dunning remained a although Crown didn’t have any legal For a few different reasons, you felt an displayed any violence and that I was siding 2D character to me. All of the security staff obligation to have notified the police, they antipathy towards casinos before you with a dead man, simply because it was from Crown who gave evidence during ‘probably had a moral obligation’ to have even began writing the book. Was it READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 7 difficult to keep your views objective In Last Bets, a person describes the that prompted me to seek out a problem when undertaking research? casino as ‘a place of mythology’, that upon gambling researcher and look into the That well-documented antipathy of mine entering a casino they ‘[buy] into some psychology of addiction. towards casinos was actually part of the kind of personal myth, that they become I actually arrived at a clearer reason that I wanted to write this book. I’d somebody or something different to when understanding of why people are worked as a waitress in the high-rollers they walked in’. This anecdote hints at compelled to gamble when I accidentally room of Brisbane’s casino when I was the complexity behind gambling, an idea got addicted to Candy Crush. I spoke to at uni, and hated every minute of it. I’ve you flesh out well through the multitude David Walsh about compulsion feedback reflexively loathed casinos, and gambling, of subjects you talk with in your book. loops, Skinnerian psychology, and why ever since but recognised that it was an How did you use these encounters – with those famously horny rats are just like adolescent loathing. It seemed lazy to say David Walsh, or a Crown casino priest, for cocaine addicts. that of course I hated casinos, I used to example – to establish a clearer picture of have to wash out ashtrays in one seven why people gamble? Are there any works of true crime that years ago. I wanted to test and question I don’t personally have any compulsion influenced you when writing this book? whether my footing on the moral high to gamble, so in order to have any I re-read Janet Malcolm’s excellent ground was as sure as I thought it was. understanding of the psychology behind analysis of a murder trial, Iphigenia in I constantly questioned that it I needed to seek out as many interviews Forest Hills, trying to figure out how to bias throughout the book, and weighed it as I could and approach the issue from all make my coverage of a long court case against new evidence that I encountered. sides. A few years ago my uncle surprised remotely interesting. Helen Garner’s Joe I hope that by being so transparent I everyone in the family by revealing that he Cinque’s Consolation has never been far managed to be objective. Because I was was a problem gambler, and that was a real from my side these past two years, and so acutely aware of my pre-existing bias, I eye-opener for me. He was good enough I made the mistake of re-reading Chloe think I went out of my way to try to come to allow me to interview him for this book, Hooper’s The Tall Man when I was at a around to casinos, to understand why so and that really helped me to understand the particularly low point and very nearly set many people enjoy gambling. I interviewed issue on a personal level. my computer on fire rather than continue a lot of professional gamblers as part of my Gambling is an impossibly broad trying to write this book. Anna Krien’s research, and ended up being convinced subject, so I focused my line of enquiry on Night Games was published just as I’d that maybe it wouldn’t be as horrible to that gap between morals and the law and finished writing up all my material from play the occasional game of poker as I’d the issues that came up throughout the court and was ready to try and figure out thought it would be. David Walsh told me court case. When a witness gave evidence how I was going to weave through the rest that I don’t give much away and he couldn’t that she had been sitting at a poker of my research. I figured I could just copy get a read on me, so he wouldn’t be able machine for half an hour, for instance, and whatever she did, but then of course she to play poker against me. Maybe I should the defence pointed out that she’d been went and started her book with the verdict. consider a change of career. sitting there for three and a half hours, That wasn’t going to work for me.

Continued from page 5 failure that is very funny, as in the stories George Eliot and David Foster Wallace, ‘I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could be a its far-reaching narrative integrates the somehow control the fear whirling around Little More Comfortable’ and ‘How I Read discourses of philosophy, mathematics, the monastery, for ‘death outside these walls as Quickly as Possible Through My Back literature, religion, world history, politics, was simply death; death within them might Issues of the TLS’. And in almost every finance, cognitive science and love. be called murder, vampirism, witchery’. story, amusing or not, the great truth of Across the discordant cities of Oxford, what Davis is telling you – about us, about London, New York, Kabul, Islamabad and International you – could well start to please, to deeply Sylhet, a rootless irony accommodates satisfy, your inefficient brain. Zafar in place of a true home. At times Sean O’Beirne is the events coordinator for seething with class-rage, at other times CAN’T AND WON’T Readings shuddering in the wake of the unseen Lydia Davis enemy of privilege, Rahman’s ambitious Hamish Hamilton. HB. $32.99 IN THE LIGHT OF WHAT first novel tells the multifaceted story of Lydia Davis WE KNOW a postcolonial man who becomes global. Both sophisticated and tender, In the Light writes Zia Haider Rahman extraordinary stories of What We Know is an intricate account of Picador. PB. $29.99 about our the audacity of world-making and a eulogy Haunted and incompetence. Not the to our steadfast desire to understand and haggard, an old more obvious be understood. friend appears, incompetence: the Lucy Van is a freelance reviewer unrecognisable, on an slippery slides and investment banker’s fallings flat that are IN PARADISE doorstep one South the stuff of light Kensington morning. Peter Matthiessen comedy. Davis makes her stories from our The mysteries Scribe. PB. $27.99 deeper, more fundamental incompetence: contained in this Arriving at the way we think. The way we try and get moment – Where has Auschwitz for an our thinking to stop, to stay under control, the man been? What has happened to him? ecumenical retreat in to give us an answer. The way we try, over Why has he returned? – form the basis of 1996, Clements Olin – a and over, to organise our thoughts. Like Zia Haider Rahman’s debut novel, In the Polish-born American trying to make a dog, or a puppy, stay Light of What We Know. Related by an poet and scholar – is absolutely still. unnamed and seemingly unremarkable asked what new angle Davis has no desire to make the narrator, the novel seeks to shine light on he has on something usual mistake and say that her brain is the enigma of Zafar, a class-traversing, that’s been covered in the one that can tidy its mess into some world-beating, self-described interloper. 10,000 books: the secure new system. Like Beckett, like At several breaking points, Zafar draws his Shoah. Tempers flare, fists rise, and then Kafka, she cunningly removes all our friend into tales that scale the humble just as quickly Clements admits he bigger think-attempts, all our issue and beginnings of the son of a Bangladeshi probably isn’t qualified to write on the -ism making. She is much more interested waiter to the heights of Oxford, Wall Holocaust. He’s not a survivor; he’s perhaps in the constant, smaller effort of our Street and the UN frontline. Cut not a not even Jewish. What right does he have consciousness: our continuous little little from Gatsby’s cloth, but shot through to bear witness? So begins this quest for self-broadcast of questions, corrections, with bolts of Scheherazade, the novel truth, identity and redemption. trivia, shame, plans, complaints and unfurls a narrative of someone who has Writing a monograph on inexplicable dreams. Her stories leave us seen too much in a life defined by its Holocaust survivor and poet Tadeusz right where we (usually) are. pursuit of truth. Borowski, Clements casts himself off If all this sounds forbidding, it Set against the twinned as a researcher among the Europeans, should: a Lydia Davis story can introduce backdrops of the financial crisis and the Americans, Germans, Poles, Jews, you to an amount of concentrated war in Afghanistan, this contemporary Catholics, Buddhists, Palestinians, Israelis, ordinary failure that you may not wish bildungsroman executes a number of academics and survivors seeking healing to be reminded of. But if you can, persist. We love a good story grand allusions. A polyphonic novel or meaning, while residing and meditating She sometimes makes a kind of pattern, whose scope pays tribute to Melville, within the walls of this most symbolic or report, out of the hum of daily human 8 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

luck.’ Family Life traces the troubled replaced by a new moment, a new memory. childhood of Ajay, the youngest son of an What This sets quite a dizzying pace. Maud holds aspiring immigrant family. We first the key to both mysteries – knowing that encounter the Mishras when they are living Maud must get to the answers before her I in Delhi during the late 1970s, and Ajay is memory slips away entirely makes for a Marie Matteson eight years old. His father has emigrated to tense read. And no one is listening to her. Loved Readings Carlton America, and the two brothers anticipate Reminiscent of S.J. Watson’s the day when they too will move. A year Before I Go To Sleep, but perhaps less later, aeroplane tickets arrive, and the successful, Elizabeth is Missing is still family establish their new home in a a gripping mystery and an interesting one-bedroom apartment in a brown-brick GIRL MEETS BOY: THE MYTH OF IPHIS depiction of what it might be like to live building in Queens. When Ajay’s older Ali Smith within dementia. brother, Birju, is severely injured in a Text. PB. $23.95 Brigid Mullane is a freelance reviewer swimming pool accident, any expectations As I was texting my sister, asking her to lend me her copy of Girl that the family held for their new life Meets Boy so I could write this column, she was, in that moment, FOURTH OF JULY CREEK quickly crumble. handing it to a friend to read. I lost my copy a while ago to the same Smith Henderson Sharma’s novel is carefully practice. She retrieved it for me, and I sat down to re-read a story I William Heinemann. PB. Was $32.99 economic in its language – each phrase or have read and loved on several occasions and yet can never entirely $27.99 piece of dialogue feels intimate, drawing recall. The details might be hazy as I always read it in one sitting; I the reader nearer to the simmering start the book and for a couple of hours I am swept up and carried Sometimes it cauldron of the Mishra family’s daily life. along by Ali Smith’s mesmerising language. I am deposited at the feels like books Family Life is deeply rewarding for its end feeling invigorated, filled with the joy of the ideas, but again, I’ve very soon forgotten find their own way to detailed depiction of the contemporary the plot – though that may be the point. you. I was drawn to immigrant experience: in Delhi, Ajay Girl Meets Boy was written as part of the Canongate Myth Series wherein Fourth of July Creek in viewed his father as superfluous – ‘I used to contemporary authors were asked to re-imagine classic myths. Reinterpreting the story of a pile of proofs at the think our father was assigned to us by the Iphis, in which a young girl is turned into a boy with the help of the gods, Smith takes on Carlton office for no government. This was because he appeared one of the only happy stories from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. particular reason, and to serve no purpose’ – but in America, Smith’s version of this godly intervention, which turns an impending tragedy it turned out to be an Ajay’s father takes on new significance, into a triumph, is set in 2007 and takes us from Minoan Crete to Inverness. Smith brings exact fit for my current showing his sons The Empire Strikes Back this subversive myth to life in a modern-day satire that is somehow both a rom-com reading jag (for the record: down-and-out and taking them to the library in Queens. and a political statement. This very slim book – 160 pages – surprises me on every re- Americana). This book is every which way Ajay’s mother wears her first pair of jeans, reading. Each time I realise I have forgotten the names of the two sisters who narrate the of cool: cool author with cool name (Smith and the boys relish in teasing her, lightly, metamorphosis, the particulars of the corporation involved, the names of the satirised co- Henderson!), provenance (Portland via about her fat thighs. workers and the order of scenes. All of those details are a pleasure on rediscovery, but what Montana), institutional links (Michener Family Life presents a beautiful, Center for Writers, Austin) and unsentimental story of grief, made endorsements (Philipp Meyer). But the unerringly alive by the small, intimate ‘Smith brings this subversive myth to life in a modern-day satire that is coolest thing is that it is a seriously good moments of familial love. It is funny, odd, somehow both a rom-com and a political statement ... It is sly and playful, first novel with a plot that’s so involving perfectly formed, and sophisticated in its it’ll spill over into your dreams. subverting expectations’ detail – it is our good luck as readers to Pete Snow is a social worker in encounter such a thing. 1980s small-town Montana, helping the I most enjoy is the sensation of reading. That the plot is hard to pin down feels in some children of local families living on the Belle Place is the editor of Readings Monthly ways irrelevant – I read this book for the language, for the journey. edge. During this work he encounters an Ali Smith’s writing appears as a stream of consciousness, and yet even as a array of misfits and renegades: a feral child OWLS DO CRY stream it runs a well-defined course, banked in, controlled, gurgling along, and then and his survivalist father; a gang of dope Janet Frame spilling into moments of clarity: ‘Was I the force of water through stone? I was hard growers; lawmen with a grudge; confused Text. PB. $12.95 all right, and then I was sinew, I was a snake, I changed stone to snake in three simple teenagers. Some are seeking his counsel; In the tip, the moves, stoke stake, snake …’ others are hoping to avoid it. Though siblings Francie, I have never read an author that clearly takes such joy in the English language. he’s trying to keep it all together, things Toby, Daphne and It is sly and playful, subverting expectations, even down to the title of Girl Meets Boy. aren’t going well in Pete’s personal life, Chicks meet again in Those three words contain the sum of the story: transformation, gender fluidity, a and during the search to find his missing death and madness and romantic comedy. This is both myth and satire, woven with a pointed social commentary. daughter, the story navigates some dark dark moments, and talk As one protagonist states, ‘I will also have to find a way of telling the story that doesn’t places of loss, despair and hopelessness. to one another and make people look away, or go and sit somewhere else.’ In her artful telling of Girl Meets Every seedy dive bar and abandoned house search for treasure. Boy, Smith achieves just this, and her light tale settles with an unexpected weight. is sharply imagined, rendered with the Sometimes the tip is kind of vivid but economical description smoothed over – that gives the book an incredibly cinematic Chicks as an adult will have her house built quality – the dialogue is so character-rich and horrific of death camps. Very quickly upon it – but Daphne is always there, ‘in the ELIZABETH IS MISSING that I was casting the film adaptation as I dead room’, with her shaved head, waiting the project turns perverse and teeters on Emma Healey read. If, like me, you’ve been entranced by disaster as the hungry ghosts of Auschwitz to be made better and returned to the Viking. PB. $29.99 recent work from Willy Vlautin, Tupelo nightmare of the woollen mill. In the place fuel contemporary hatreds and ignorance. Hassman, Poe Ballantine or Russell Banks Bitter arguments ensue and very few Maud’s memory on the hill the patients’ handwork reminds is fading. She is – books which illuminate the stories of Daphne of the woollen mill; she screams ‘to are left unoffended. However, this is people who fall through the cracks in less painful than intellectual, leaving the surrounded by notes see the mounds of wool and the dazed that she has written to dark times – then you’re on my jag too, people picking threads, like red and yellow emotional pull of the novel to rest on a and Henderson’s book is simply a must. If strange courtship between Clements and a help keep her world worms, and sewing, and digging needles in together: Coffee aids you’re not, well, quite frankly: you should canvas, embroidering a rose, because there Catholic nun. Alongside a desire to uncover get on it. A great debut. family history and a search for his mother, memory; No more peach seemed a rule, everywhere, that roses do all the plotlines enmesh, promising an slices; Haven’t heard Alison Huber is from Readings Carlton not grow in gardens any more but upon entirely brokenhearted affair, but we never from Elizabeth. In tablecloths and cushions and fire screens quite get there. Elizabeth Is Missing, FAMILY LIFE and hearth rugs…’ The eminent Peter Matthiessen Emma Healey presents us with two Akhil Sharma And Janet Frame, she is gone, passed away in April this year and many unreliable narrators – one young, the other Faber. PB. $27.99 but she pierced the world with her eyes in her eighties and growing increasingly and her senses and we’ll always have will see this as his last masterful stroke, In Akhil Sharma’s confused – both of whom are ignored by the treasure, like this, her first novel, contemplating the deep truths of humanity astounding the people around them. Two mysteries sitting among the best modern novels, so – but others will be left wanting. It’s second novel, a young run parallel: in the present day, Maud is sharp and vivid a voice, so sure so early possible that Borowski and others, such boy visiting his older convinced something has happened to her on, despite the hurt and horror of what as Primo Levi, have numbed the power of brother, who has friend and confidante Elizabeth and, in the she had already been through; a writer contemporary Holocaust fiction like In suffered catastrophic past, a young Maud struggles to find the and a poet waiting always inside her Paradise. Then again, both these men killed brain damage, calls the truth behind the disappearance of her (and here now) in the place of treasures themselves from guilt and shame, which older boy ‘Brother-life’, sister, Sukey. and darkness, with her own sense of is probably Matthiessen’s point – that the because ‘it was The structure of the book takes a punctuating space, her own way of seeing creation of art ‘is the one path that might melodramatic and while to become accustomed to. Moments how the world is like the body and how lead toward apprehension of that ultimate because by saying something melodramatic, for Maud slip by and overlap and we switch the body contains a torrent of images evil beyond understanding’. I could make myself sound ridiculous, like a between the present day and the past; just and worlds of associated sensations, like child, and so not be blamed for my good Luke May is a freelance reviewer as Maud begins to grasp information it is ‘crumbling farmhouses, eyeless, with their READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 9 door open upon a yellow blotched throat THE CONFABULIST unfurling in startlingly modern ways. The of corridor lined with chains of decayed Steven Galloway great gift of this new translation allows rosebuds and lilies’. Always decay, for Text. PB. $29.99 readers to hear all the nuances of Leskov’s someone who had faced so much of it, and brilliant language. Harry Houdini, once death. But a ‘buoyancy of creativity and the most famous brightness’ there too, as Margaret Drabble TIGERMAN WELCOME TO person on the planet, suggests in her introduction. At the end, can make the Nick Harkaway you are lying down, there is weight on impossible seem real. William Heinemann. PB. $32.99 your chest, but your mind is lit up. THE GAP YEAR So when Martin Lester Ferris, sergeant Angela Meyer is the author of Captives and Strauss accidentally of the British Army, is editor of The Great Unknown. Meyer cites kills the great burned out and about FROM HELL Frame as an influence on her own writing; she magician, his own life to be retired. The has previously reviewed Frame's work in the is turned upside down. island of Mancreu is Australian and on her blog, LiteraryMinded. He loses his home, the woman he loves the ideal place for and every hope he once had. Now his forty-year-old Lester to THE AWAKENING OF doctor has informed him he is losing his serve out his time. It’s a MISS PRIM mind too, and Martin decides it is time to former British colony Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera set the record straight with Houdini’s in legal limbo – a mildly larcenous backwater perfect for Abacus. PB. $29.99 daughter, Alice. But a lifetime of sleight of hand takes some explaining. shady business, none of which should be a When Prudencia Prim, problem, because Lester’s brief is to turn a a young woman of HALF WORLD blind eye. But Lester has made a friend: a intelligence and brilliant, internet-addled street kid who achievement, accepts Scott O’Connor will need a home when the island dies. the post of private Scribe. PB. $32.99 Now, as Mancreu’s small society tumbles librarian in the village Inspired by the into violence, the boy needs Lester to be of San Ireneo de shocking history of more than just an observer. Arnois, she is MKULTRA, the CIA’s unprepared for what secret mind-control THE FIRST TRUE LIE she encounters there. program, Scott Marina Mander & Stephen Twilley Her employer is dashing yet contrarian, O’Connor has crafted a (trans.) always ready with a critique of her literary thriller that Canongate. PB. $22.99 cherished Jane Austen and Louisa May vividly imagines the Alcott. Prudencia hoped for friendship in devastating legacy of Meet Luca, a curious ‘a well-crafted and gutsy San Ireneo but she didn’t suspect that she such an operation. young boy living with first novel … ’ Henry March, an unassuming CIA analyst his mother, a taciturn might find love – or that the course of her Books+Publishing new life would run quite so rocky. forced to spearhead MKULTRA’s San woman who every now Francisco branch, finds himself bridging an and then tries out a new THE RISE AND FALL OF untenable divide between his devotion to father. One morning his GREAT POWERS his family and the brutality of his daily task. mum doesn’t wake up, so Luca – driven by a fremantlepress.com.au Tom Rachman Torn between duty and conscience, Henry disappears without a trace. Twenty years deep fear of being an Text. PB. $29.99 later, under the weight of the Vietnam War, orphan – decides to Who is Tooly another troubled young agent, Dickie pretend to the world Zylberberg and how Ashby, will risk everything to find Henry. that his mum is still alive. Soon, however, the did she end up running laundry starts piling up, the fridge empties a second-hand ANIMALS – and the smell of Mama’s decaying body bookstore in Wales? Emma Jane Unsworth begins to permeate the apartment. As Luca The Russian émigré Canongate. PB. $27.99 grapples with what to do, we ultimately Humphrey teaches her witness something much more poignant Laura and Tyler are to play chess, but how than the morbid circumstances. does he fit in? Or best friends who live Knowing Sarah, who turns up together, angrily FLYING SHOES without warning and then disappears philosophising and Joey Field leading each other Lisa Howorth again? And what about Venn, who seems Bloomsbury. PB. $27.99 to be one step ahead of everybody? astray in the pubs and Mother’s Day 1966: the latest release by Award winning author Spanning three decades, and taking us flats of Manchester. Mary Byrd Thornton’s from Bangkok to Brooklyn to the border But things are set to kid stepbrother is towns of Wales, this is a story about how change. Laura is sexually molested and the lives we lead can seem indecipherable engaged to teetotal murdered. They never even to us. Jim, the wedding is just months away, and Tyler becomes hell-bent on sabotaging her find the killer and the YOUR FATHERS, WHERE friend’s plans for a different life. Animals teenaged Mary watches her life fall apart ARE THEY? AND THE is a refreshingly honest tale of how a friendship can become the ultimate love around her. Thirty PROPHETS, DO THEY story. years later, after LIVE FOREVER? suppressing the tragedy and building a new Dave Eggers THE ENCHANTED life for herself, a reluctant Mary is brought “By the time we drove into town a briny Hamish Hamilton. PB. $29.99 WANDERER AND OTHER home again by a reporter’s phone call. smelling fog had rolled in from the bay Available 14 June STORIES Based on the still-unsolved case of Lisa shrouding the buildings and street lamps and Howorth’s own stepbrother, Flying Shoes is the air was filled with a mournful moaning. In a barracks on an Nikolai Leskov My feel-good moment was immediately a luminous novel about family and memory. replaced by a sense of foreboding.” abandoned military Vintage. PB. $12.99 base, Thomas watches Nikolai Leskov’s as the man he has THE STORIES writing exploded the A story of mystery and intrigue, brought wakes up. Kev, Jane Gardam conventions of of friendship and acceptance. a NASA astronaut, Little, Brown. HB. $39.99 nineteenth-century TOLD THROUGH THE ALTERNATE doesn’t recognise his For 50 years novelist Russian fiction. Here is captor, though Thomas Jane Gardam has been VIEWPOINTS OF BROTHER AND SISTER, the other Russia, remembers him. Kev writing short stories, MATT AND STEPHIE, this book mythical and untamed: cries for help. But the each one packed with an uneasy synthesis of is sure to appeal to the reader in ocean is close by, and the originality, wry Orthodoxy and Old the 10-16 year old age group. nobody can hear him over the waves and comedy and narrative Believers, a land wind. Thomas apologises. He didn't want brilliance of her longer DISTRIBUTED BY PAN MACMILLAN populated by soldiers and monks, serfs and WWW.PANMACMILLAN.COM.AU to have to resort to this. But they really fiction. Passion and princes, Tartars and gypsies – a vast needed to have a conversation, and Kev longing, metamorph- PUBLISHED BY country brimming with the promise of BROLGA PUBLISHING didn’t answer his messages. And now, if osis and enchantment magic. These 17 tales are innovative in form CONTACT MARK ZOCCHI Kev can just stop yelling, Thomas has a are Gardam’s themes, and like a magician and rich in wordplay, the narratives www.brolgapublishing.com.au few questions. she plucks them from the quietest of [email protected] 10 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

Interview Far from the Tree Bronte Coates interviews Andrew Solomon about unorthodox families, his own included

ar from the Tree is frequently circumstances affect the middle class. But in Minneapolis. I had a close friend from superhero narrative, which is a pet love described as a ‘life-changing’ my experience with my interview subjects college who’d gone through a divorce and of mine, such as when I consider how book, and I’d absolutely agree was of great commonalities. We might wanted to have children. And so she and I different characters from the X-Men with this statement; after have different social status, but we shared have a daughter, and mother and daughter comics react to the idea of ‘a cure’. Do Freading the book I’ve viewed my own experiences of having stigmatised identities live in Texas. And my husband and I have a you feel this comparison is justified? relationship with my family differently. in one way or another. So I knew from my son who lives with us all the time, of whom I’m afraid I’m not strong on superheroes Do you feel a sense of responsibility for experience as a gay person what it was like I am the biological father and our surrogate and never read X-Men. But George such a reaction from readers? to have people look down at you for your for the pregnancy was Laura, the lesbian is beginning to take an interest in I’m of course honoured by the designation disability or other defining condition. I was mother of Oliver and Lucy in Minneapolis. superheroes, so I am probably at the brink of it as a life-changing book, and have been dismayed to encounter, over and over again, So the shorthand is five parents of four of a new education on this front. I just especially moved by letters I’ve received people whose lower income and education children in three states. And there are Googled ‘X-Men cure’ and got news of a that emphasize that point. My favourites levels prevented them from getting services people who think that the existence of my treatment that makes the mutants into have been a letter that said simply, ‘Reading to which they were entitled — either family somehow undermines or weakens or normal human beings, and I suppose that is your book helped me to love my children because they didn’t know enough to ask for damages their family. And there are people just what I and the others in my book have better’ — and one that came from a nun what they needed, or because they didn’t who think that families like mine shouldn’t looked at. Would we want to be ‘cured’ and who maintained that after reading the have the force to deal with obstructive be allowed to exist. And I don’t accept to lose the thing that makes us strange and book, she’d decided to leave her orders and agencies and government bureaucracies. I subtractive models of love. Only additive foreign? Most of us would have done so have a family. Of course, changing lives is wanted to tell the story of that injustice. ones. And I believe that in the same way as kids (I’d have loved to be straight when a responsibility and I am always concerned that we need species diversity to ensure I was fourteen) and most of us wouldn’t to be sure I haven’t changed many of In a previous interview with the Guardian that the planet can go on, so we need this do so now (I’d never give up the exact them for the worse. The nun made me a you described yourself as ‘one of five diversity of affection and diversity of family marriage I have). Autistic friends tell the trifle anxious; I hope family life is all she parents with four children in three states’. in order to strengthen the ecosphere of same story. We are mutants of a sort, but imagines. In general, though, the purpose Can you explain what you mean by this? kindness. most of us have superpowers of some kind, of the book was to alter the discourse My husband is the biological father of and would be loathe to give them up! around family by demonstrating that what two children with some lesbian friends My favourite stories are usually about we really get from having children is not a families, and the intricate worlds they Are you working on a new project now? mirror of ourselves but a surprising, new, build around themselves – the private If yes, can you tell us about it? unimaginable set of relationships. And jokes and languages, or strange habits I am! I’m writing a new book about the often enough, having children who aren’t that develop – and this was a big part of idea that in an era in which women work what we had in mind when we set out to why I loved Far from the Tree. What is an and men are involved in childcare, our have children proves more rewarding than aspect that forms part of the world your ideas of motherhood and fatherhood are we’d have guessed; people end up grateful own family has built? gradually merging into a single idea of for lives they’d have done anything to avoid. Oh, it would take many pages to describe all parenthood — a shift both reflected in and It’s a book about difficulty, but also about our eccentricities. Every night, my husband occasioned by single parents by choice, hope, and my wish for it is that it gives or I tells a story to our son George. My open adoptions, gay families, expanded enormous hope to my readers. husband’s stories are all about his childhood foster care, changed ideas about divorce, growing up in small-town Wisconsin. Mine and all the other new structures of family The families you’ve interviewed for are about a fantastical world we’ve made up that are enriching the world around us. Far from the Tree come from diverse where two children, Lucille and Blue Seal, backgrounds, some of which are quite live in a house at the top of a tree with their What’s on your current reading list? disadvantaged. How did being in a more teacher, Miss Smudge. I’m half way through Elizabeth Gilbert’s privileged position shape the way you The Signature of All Things, which approached this work, and others? Something else I really love in your is masterfully wrought and utterly The subjects in my book represent the full work are the ways you talk about engrossing, written with insight, wit, socio-economical spectrum. I didn’t want the relationship between identity and real profundity. I’d recommend it to write a book that was about how these Andrew Solomon. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz and illness. It reminds me a lot of the unconditionally.

Continued from page 9 Holliday. McMurtry traces the rich and a seamless collaboration between two varied friendship of Wyatt Earp and Doc Graphic Novels vivid, engaging storytellers. corners: from Wimbledon gardens and Holliday from the town of Long Grass to This release ties with a multimedia cold churches, from London buses and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Denver, THE TRUTH IS A CAVE IN storytelling event originally commissioned industrial backstreets. A mother watching then to Mobetie, Texas, and finally to THE BLACK MOUNTAINS by the Sydney Opera House in which her children on the beach dreams of a Tombstone, Arizona, culminating with the Gaiman reads aloud his story against long-lost lover, an abandoned army wife famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Neil Gaiman the backdrop of Campbell’s artwork, sees a ghost at a moorland gate, a Headline. HB. $29.99 accompanied by a live underscore provided translator adrift in Geneva is haunted by THE LIVES OF OTHERS Illustrated by by FourPlay String Quartet. the unspeakable manifestation of her own artist Eddie Neel Mukherjee Bronte Coates is the online and Readings fears, and a colonial servant wreaks Campbell, The Truth is Chatto & Windus. PB. $32.99 Monthly assistant revenge on her monstrous masters. Available 14 June a Cave in the Black Mountains is a graphic Set in Calcutta 1967, novel edition of Neil THE LAST KIND WORDS The Lives of Others Poetry Gaiman’s award- SALOON anatomises the soul of winning story of the Larry McMurtry a nation as it unpacks same name, a haunting tale of family, MY FEET ARE HUNGRY PanMac. PB. $29.99 the story of a family revenge and a search for hidden treasure. Chris Wallace-Crabbe Here, Larry McMurtry history. When the In typical Gaiman fashion, the story is Pitt Street Poetry. PB. $25 returns to the vivid idealist Supratik genre-defying – fable-like yet modern, portrait of the cowboy disappears into the This sparkling new with a hint of melodrama and shot lifestyle made so world of extremist collection marks the through with a chilling darkness that calls memorable in his political activism, the eightieth birthday of to mind the Grimms’ fairytales. Best Pulitzer Prize-winning ageing patriarch and matriarch of his our most elegantly known as the illustrator of From Hell western Lonesome family presiding over their large household metaphysical poet. (Alan Moore’s graphic novel about Dove, and tells the are caught by surprise, unaware that the Over the years Chris infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper), story of the closing of sands have been shifting beneath them. Wallace-Crabbe has Campbell’s artwork fits with the story so the American frontier With poisonous rivalries and destructive inspired countless perfectly that his imaginative and through the travails of two of its most secrets, here is a family unravelling in sync other writers and gorgeous four-colour paintings feel immortal figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc with the society around them. readers through the inseparable from the words. The book is imaginative effects of his writing. In his READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 11 review of this collection, Peter Booker prize-winning novel The Goldsworthy of the Australian describes Luminaries, about fate, history and the the book as a, ‘sometimes wry, sometimes writing in the stars. playful, but always clear-eyed look at what looms ahead’. ARCHER MAGAZINE, ISSUE 2 Anthologies Amy Middleton (ed.) Archer. PB. $20 The second edition of MEANJIN VOL. 73, NO. 2 Archer Magazine will Zora Sanders (ed.) be launched at the MUP. PB. $29.99 Emerging Writers’ The June issue of Festival this month. Meanjin is one for Acting as a relic of its taking stock and time, Archer’s taking risks. Liam manifesto is to present Pieper argues that engaging, inclusive we’ve well and truly viewpoints from the myriad genders, lost the war on drugs, sexualities and identities of Australia. This Suzy Freeman-Greene issue features Anne Hunter on polyamory, takes a look at our Krissy Kneen on sex addiction and Steven obsession with the weather, Fatima Ross on being Aboriginal and gay, alongside Measham welcomes us to Werribee and articles on asexuality, rights for sex shows us a whole new side of a much- workers, and the biology of homosexuality, maligned suburb and Zora Sanders talks plus photographic essays by Leila Koren, to Eleanor Catton, author of the Man Charlie Brophy and Greta Punch.

Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist

THE NARROW ROAD TO EYRIE THE DEEP NORTH Tim Winton Richard Flanagan Hamish Hamilton. HB. Was $45 Vintage. PB. $32.95 $36.95 Partially inspired by Divorced and his father’s time spent unemployed, Tom working on the Thai– Keely has lost faith in Burma ‘Death’ Railway everything precious to during World War II, him. Until an awkward Flanagan’s novel is one encounter with a of savage beauty. Our woman from his past reviewer says, ‘Like and a young boy Dorrigo, we feel an changes everything. immense weight of Our reviewer writes, loss, but what ultimately sticks is that this, ‘The writing is elegant and admirably true at times near unbearably, is a wholly to where it’s from; Winton crafts poetry human novel.’ from the salty Australian vernacular.’ THE NIGHT GUEST THE SWAN BOOK Fiona McFarlane Alexis Wright Hamish Hamilton. PB. $29.99 Giramondo. PB. $29.95 One morning Ruth Oblivia Ethylene is our wakes thinking a tiger guide through has been in her seaside Wright’s nightmarish house. Later that day a vision of Australia’s formidable woman future, one ravaged by called Frida arrives. climate change and Both woman and tiger extreme politics. Our are here to stay, and reviewer writes, neither is what they ‘There are beautifully seem. Our reviewer constructed passages says, ‘As readers we hold tight, cautious where Wright positions the land like a that a very real foreboding presence is now living creature, volatile and moving with lapping at Ruth’s feet.’ as much fierce energy as the operatic cast of characters.’ MY BEAUTIFUL ENEMY Cory Taylor ALL THE BIRDS, SINGING Text. PB. $29.99 Evie Wyld Arthur Wheeler is Vintage. PB. $32.99 haunted by his Set between Australia infatuation with a and a remote English Japanese youth he island, All the Birds, encountered in the Singing is the story of enemy alien camp how one woman’s where he worked as a present comes from a guard during World terrible past. Our War II and, abandoning reviewer writes, ‘The his family, sets out on a beauty, simplicity and doomed mission. Our reviewer writes, tension of Wyld’s ‘There’s a sadness underlining the story, prose, and her skill at reflecting Jake’s quiet and yet surging, which is reminiscent moods against the weather and wildlife of of a Kazuo Ishiguro novel.’ her severe surroundings, are exquisite.’ 12 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

New Crime Dead Write MR MERCEDES of the incredible World War Z by Max Stephen King Brooks, this narrative travels the world via the people connected with the accident, with Fiona Hardy H&S. PB. $32.99 and those left behind – all children, and In a grim American none quite the same as before. Crime Book of the Month town, out-of-work folk line up hopefully at a job fair. Alcoholic THE ART OF KILLING LONELY GRAVES loner Brady Hartfield WELL Britta Bolt gets behind the wheel Marco Malvaldi H&S. PB. $29.99 of his Mercedes and MacLehose. PB. $29.95 According to my research (i.e. reading the note at the drives straight into the At a time when reality start of this book), Amsterdam will hold funerals for any crowd, killing eight, cooking shows weren’t anonymous people – those without family, for example – who injuring more, and on year-round (and die there. These services have flowers, coffee, music and a driving away unapprehended. Months let’s have a moment’s poem written especially for the person who passed away. It’s later, bitterly retired policeman Bill silence for this through this rather touching idea that we enter into Lonely Hodges receives a letter claiming a further upsetting piece of Graves, by author Rodney Bolt and lawyer Britta Böhler, who attack is coming – something much bigger. history), the together write as Britta Bolt. One of the team members who Perennial favourite (and car-as-weapon bountifully works to put a name to these bodies, Pieter Posthumus (luckily everyone in the book specialist) Stephen King again turns his moustachioed Italian makes jokes about his name so I don’t have to), is tasked one May morning with hand to hardboiled crime – expect to be food writer Pellegrino tracking down the identity of a man who committed suicide in his nearly bare driven to distraction (sorry). Artusi wrapped up the nineteenth century apartment. Posthumus is the best man for such a job: while his colleagues would take a with the book The Science of Cooking and perfunctory look around and then draw a line underneath someone’s identity, he will TWISTED the Art of Eating Well. Author Marco Lynda La Plante Malvaldi has taken Artusi and thrown him S&S. PB. Was $32.99 into a Tuscan castle, and there the chef’s ‘One of the team members who works to put a name to these bodies, Pieter $27.99 relaxing visit takes an unexpected turn Posthumus (luckily everyone in the book makes jokes about his name so I Teenager Amy is when he has to use his culinary talents to don’t have to), is tasked one May morning with tracking down the identity athletic, beautiful, a hunt for a killer instead of a perfect truffle. of a man who committed suicide in his nearly bare apartment.’ star student – but she is also struggling with the CHILDREN OF WAR upcoming divorce of Martin Walker not give up. He is still holding on to clues that led him nowhere a month later, when her parents, Lena and Quercus. PB. $29.99 another body appears, washed up in the Prinsengracht canal. The police, in a society Marcus. One weekend, A body is found in the full of tension between cultures and generations, aren’t concerned about the why of Amy plans a sleepover woods of the how the young Moroccan man got there – rather, Posthumus is there to find the who, at a friend’s house – enchanting French and uncovers that part of his own family, frayed for so long but now finally coming and it’s only on town of St Denis, home together, may be the connection he needs. Monday that the truth comes out: she was of luxurious food and This is the first book in a trilogy I’d be happy to continue with, and is the first not at her friend’s house that weekend, and wine and the mellow crime book set in the Netherlands that I’ve read. Bolt’s Amsterdam, while home to hasn’t been seen since Saturday, when she Bruno, chief of police. a strong undercurrent of racism, is far too relaxed a place for high-speed car chases, went to stay with her father. Marcus claims And Bruno, it turns out, with everyone scooting about on Vespas and bicycles and having extended lunches, she was not with him, and despite his had spoken to the but this doesn’t lessen the tension of what is a very engaging book with a protagonist sketchy story – and the reveal of unpleasant victim – an undercover so unwavering in his path that he would probably be a very frustrating co-worker (as family secrets – DSI Marshe suspects he is policeman – just hours earlier, as he he’d always show you up). But as someone to read about, Posthumus holds enormous not to blame. So where is Amy? requested help. While Bruno fights his literary appeal. superiors to allocate enough time to this THE MURDER OF case, another problem – a young man HARRIET KROHN desperate to return to St Denis, but whose QUOTA sixties Melbourne as clearly as if you’re Karin Fossum arrival causes even more discord – threatens Jock Serong reading it through heart-shaped glasses: the beautiful place that Bruno calls home. this is brazen, atmospheric reading. Harvill Secker. PB. $32.99 Text. PB. $29.99 Inspector Konrad Sejer Lawyer Charlie Jardim CLOSE CALL THE SILKWORM is an oddity in fictional has left his career – or Stella Rimington detectives: neither rather, his career left Robert Galbraith alcoholic nor arrogant; Bloomsbury. PB. $29.99 him – after blowing up Sphere. PB. Was $32.99 appreciates authority Dame Stella Rimington, in the courtroom. With $26.99 and rules; and he is former director general his girlfriend following Available 19 June perpetually successful of MI5, returns with suit in giving him the Sadly, this reviewer at catching criminals. another probably-not- flick, Charlie isn’t able could not get her When elderly Harriet true-but-we’d-never- to say no to a job offer hands on a copy of this Krohn is found dead in know-otherwise from a colleague, before its strict her apartment, her antique silver gone and intelligence procedural. located in the seaside town of Dauphin. publication date, but a bouquet of flowers at the scene, Charles MI5’s counter- The beach can be equally beautiful and rest assured – she is as ‘Charlo’ Torp – her accidental killer – is espionage division is threatening, and the case – a murder, with excited about reading satisfied his crime won’t be discovered, and hunting down the the victim involved in both abalone and this as she is about that the money gained from her death will source of arms deals in Yemen, and Agent drugs, and we all know how bad too much talking about herself in turn his life around. But Charlo is more Liz Carlyle must deal with international abalone can be – is one that the locals the third person. J.K. affected by her death than he thought, and colleagues – and unlike at Readings, in this aren’t interested in having pursued. Rowling is an excellent crime author, and Sejer is not one to stop searching. business, not all co-workers are your her oversized hero Cormoran Strike, along friends – crisscrossing the European ST KILDA BLUES with his sharp yet guileless assistant THREE continent until she begins to fear that her Geoffrey McGeachin Robin, have the kind of double-act rapport own country, and past, could be the source. Sarah Lotz Viking. PB. Was $29.99 that could see them as memorable as Holmes and Watson or Poirot and H&S. PB. $29.99 $24.99 THE FIFTH SEASON Hastings. Here, the wife of writer Owen While the timing A decade after his last Quine calls on their help to track down her might not be excellent, Mons Kallentoft cracking escapade – errant husband from wherever he’s run off the nerve-shredding H&S. PB. $29.99 the previous two to now (it’s not the first time, after all), but writing sure is: The No one expected a fifth Berlin books each won this time Quine is not up to his usual Three, a docu-literary- book in a series with Ned Kelly Awards shenanigans. He’s just handed in a mentary about four titles relating to the – Charlie Berlin, manuscript where all the characters are mysterious plane seasons, but here Mons ex-military, now-fraud poorly-hidden and unpleasant versions crashes at four Kallentoft has another squad, is asked to look of those from his own reality, and the different points case for Inspector into the disappearance book’s impending publication threatens around the globe, tells Malin Fors. When a of a teenage girl. His the reputations – and more – of those the story of the three people who survived family discover a investigation leads him to believe that she shady individuals. But which one is these disasters – four, if you count Pamela mutilated body in a is not alone, and that a serial killer may tempted to write Owen Quine out of Donald, the middle-aged mother who died forest, Fors immediately have a hip and happening Melbourne in existence? And has J.K. finished writing just after leaving a panicked message connects the death to a past attack on a their sights. Geoffrey McGeachin writes the third book yet? describing her last moments. Reminiscent woman who is still in a psychiatric hospital. READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 13

New Young Adult Fiction making this an interesting book to discuss with young adults. While there is much See books for kids, junior and middle readers on pages 18–19 hope here, ultimately it is a very troubling novel; I think older readers looking to Young Adult Book of the Month move away from the popular, other- worldly books filling the shelves at the moment will find this a thought-provoking THE MINNOW read. For ages 14 and up. KD Diana Sweeney Text. PB. $19.99 CRACKED I like the way that YA fiction tackles the overwhelming Clare Strahan events that scar each passing year, offering young A&U. PB. $15.99 readers a way in through a character they may identify with. A debut YA by a The Minnow, which won the Text Prize for Young Adult and Melbourne writer. At Children’s Writing last year, follows teenager Tom (real name 15, Clover is finding the Holly) a year after she’s lost both parents and her sister in a going tougher than she flood. As if that were not devastating enough, she’s now expected on the rocky pregnant by a man old enough to be her father. Abuse heaped terrain of family, on top of tragedy is a brave place to start a novel. Fortunately, Tom has a couple of friendship, first love, escape routes. acts of defiance and a She finds physical refuge with a loyal friend, Jonah, who’s also lost his family planet on the brink of but is a rock for Tom. In other ways she’s cared for by her spirited grandmother and environmental disaster. a high-school teacher. But what defines the novel are the unreal elements of Tom’s So when a friend breaks a promise, and her mother is impossible, and her beloved dog is ‘Abuse heaped on top of tragedy is a brave place to start a novel. dying, and the footy-boys are bullies and she’s arrested for vandalism, Clover must try Fortunately, Tom has a couple of escape routes.’ to make sense of her world again.

life. She has lucid conversations with her dead grandfather and unborn child (the NOWHERE BOYS minnow), and they are as much a part of the cast as anyone living. Elise McCredie The structure may lack clear signposts but I think the story is more interested Egmont. PB. $16.95 in mood and symbolism than dramatic plot. This is an aftermath story, showing Four teenage boys are how people move on. The prose ably reflects Tom’s shock and disbelief at what has hiking in the bush when happened, and the tone rarely undulates, like Tom’s surface stoicism. This may keep they are caught in a the reader at arm’s length at first but will hopefully win their admiration in the end. freak storm. After Emily Gale is from Readings Carlton surviving the night they expect a hero’s welcome, but instead INTRUDER After a while, Liv’s parents sit her and her return home to find nobody knows who Christine Bongers brother down and tell them that their mum is going to die. From this moment, Liv’s they are. Trapped in a Woolshed. PB. $18.99 whole world starts to crash, and she doesn’t world where they don’t exist, one of the boys One night, Kat really know how to feel about the situation, is conflicted while the others are desperate wakes up to find or feel about her mum. to make things go back to how they used to an intruder in her Dandelion Clocks is a sad yet be. As they grapple with conflicting desires, room. She screams and beautiful story about a family that has to the situation becomes even more desperate. the man disappears, deal with the ultimate grief – the loss of but the event becomes a loved one. The writing is spot on and as CITY OF HEAVENLY FIRE: a catalyst for Kat, and you feel Liv’s emotions shift from anger MORTAL INSTRUMENTS those around her, to and hurt to utter sadness, it’s hard to keep confront a number of BOOK 6 reading with dry eyes. I highly recommend problems they have Cassandra Clare this for readers aged 10 and up, as it’s a been ignoring. Since her mother’s death, Walker Books. PB. $19.95 good book for kids to read to understand Kat’s father has been working late shifts, Darkness has different life events, or not feel alone if they leaving Kat alone in the house. Kat’s safety descended on the are going through something similar. is at risk and although she loathes her Shadowhunter world mother’s best friend, the ‘evil witch’ who Katherine Dretzke is from Readings as Clary, Jace, Simon lives next door, she has re-entered her life, Hawthorn and their friends band along with a very slobbery dog named together to fight the Hercules. A boy named Al also appears and SMART greatest evil they have is a friend to Kat as she tries to find out Kim Slater ever faced: Clary’s own what is happening to her and struggles to PanMac. PB. $14.99 brother. Nothing in this cope with all of her troubles. It all starts when world can defeat Intruder is a satisfying read Kieran finds a Sebastian – but if they journey to the realm containing some crime, some romance and body in the river. It’s a of demons, they just might have a chance. some drama. It’s a really nicely constructed local homeless man, Who will survive the final instalment of the story about family, grief and healing, and it Colin, whom police Mortal Instruments series? stars an absolutely charming dog. believe simply fell in Kim Gruschow is from Readings Hawthorn the river and drowned, THE FAULT IN OUR though really, they STARS (FILM TIE-IN DANDELION CLOCKS don’t care what has EDITION) Rebecca Westcott happened to him. But John Green Kieran cares. He believes the homeless man Puffin. PB. $14.99 Puffin. PB. $19.99 was murdered, and he is adamant that he is Liv’s mum has Despite the tumour- going to solve the mystery. Kieran goes been acting shrinking medical about questioning Colin’s fellow homeless strange lately. She’s miracle that has bought folk regarding the sorts of people Colin Winner to be announced adamant that Liv learns her a few years, Hazel associated with, sketching in his notebook in next month’s issue! how to cook the most has never been and slowly piecing together the evidence. important meal – anything but terminal. Get involved and send us But Kieran would never have guessed that bolognaise – and that But when a gorgeous your reviews. his own horrible home life could become she shows Liv how to plot twist named entwined with the case of a murdered thereadingschildrens correctly apply Augustus Waters homeless man. bookprize.tumblr.com makeup. She’s also appears at Cancer Kid Smart tackles many issues very passed down her old diaries so that Liv can Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be relevant to today’s society. Domestic read them when she needs some help with rewritten. This edition features exclusive violence, drug trafficking, homelessness, life. But what Liv can’t understand is why stills from the forthcoming film, due for bullying and Autism are all major subjects, it’s so important they do all this stuff now. general release in local cinemas on 5 June. 14 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

New Non-Fiction dynamic between professional/mother and HARD CHOICES journalist/daughter allows for a blurred Hillary Rodham Clinton duality of psychological theory anchored Wallace-Crabbe’s own journals as S&S. HB. Was $40 to a shared personal history. At the end of Biography inspiration, Atherton has skilfully woven $32.99 their discussion, Professor Prior remarks on together a tapestry of stories, cultural events Available 10 June how proud she is of her daughter’s public and historical moments that give readers THE FEEL-GOOD HIT OF admission of shyness: ‘In your professional In the aftermath of her unprecedented insight to Wallace-Crabbe’s THE YEAR life, nobody would ever dream you were shy.’ 2008 presidential run, relationship with art, the Australian Hillary Rodham Clinton Liam Pieper Prior’s memoir is about acknowledging this landscape, his family and his approach to slippage between the public and private: expected to return to Hamish Hamilton. PB. Was $29.99 writing. Indeed, as I read the articles and what is hidden, what we don’t reveal. Shy is representing New York $24.99 poems dedicated to Wallace-Crabbe – a fascinating and engaging read. in the United States Liam Pieper’s including writing from David Malouf, Senate. Instead, newly memoir – of Patrick McCaughey, Judith Bishop and Felicity Ford is from Readings Carlton elected President family, addiction and Andrew Motion – I had the sense that I was Barack Obama asked loss – begins in a not so much reading a book about the poet, THE FICTIONAL WOMAN her to serve in his crumbling, 35-room but actually sitting opposite him – the two of Tara Moss administration as Secretary of State. This gothic mansion in us old friends. The affection and admiration HarperCollins. PB. $29.99 memoir is the story of the four extraordinary Caulfield in the 1980s, each contributor feels towards Wallace- In her first work of non- years that followed. Clinton’s descriptions of where his hippie Crabbe is almost tangible, and makes for an fiction, Tara Moss diplomatic conversations at the highest parents are struggling enlightening and heart-warming read. blends memoir and levels and analysis of how we can use ‘smart to raise their children This book is much more than social analysis to power’ to deliver security and prosperity in amid the chaos of communal living. From simply a companion text. Though Wallace- examine the common a rapidly changing world offer readers a there, the family moves to Oakleigh and Crabbe is the pivot point on which the fictions about women. master class in international relations. transitions to a life more suburban than collection spins, there is much to be learned Tracing key moments in bohemian. Pieper’s parents have a hands- about philosophy, ecology, aesthetics her life along her BITING THROUGH off approach to parenting and their open and the key movements that shaped the journey from small- John Ratcliffe policy regarding pot-smoking leads Pieper Australian literary scene. town tomboy in Canada Scribe. PB. $35 and his brothers to experiment themselves: My favourite piece would be to international fashion model and author, A former soldier, John Pieper first gets high at 12, is casually Wallace-Crabbe’s own article, ‘The Universe Moss weaves her own experiences into a Ratcliffe left the selling drugs to his friends by 14, and by 15 Cranks Up’, which outlines the influences broader study of the issues surrounding military to pursue a is a serious dealer. and motivations of his 2005 narrative poem, female identity. career practising As a narrator, Pieper is funny The Universe Looks Down. It is one of the alternative medicine in and self-deprecating. The key to Pieper’s more lucid and beautiful descriptions of a RUN FOR YOUR LIFE Melbourne. He was likeability is his skill in pitch-perfectly writer’s creative process that I have read, Jill Jolliffe later called to capturing his younger self on the page, and his observation that ‘poetry is not only Affirm Press. PB. $29.99 Afghanistan for a short often in hilarious detail: ‘I wore the same “language making a nuisance of itself” but a Jill Jolliffe has spent assignment as a outfit every day; a black denim jacket over work made as something new in the world’ her life running, security contractor, but a white t-shirt and black tracksuit pants. will remain with me. Travelling without eventually falling into a didn’t return to Australia for five years. At 13 I imagined it quite stylish, a bit like Gods is a work that I believe everyone career as a foreign Biting Through is the story of what a relaxed tuxedo – something James Bond – familiar or otherwise with Wallace- correspondent. As she happened during those years – a testimony might slip into in a post-coital languor Crabbe’s oeuvre – will walk away from risked her life to report to the brutal realities of one of the longest while he searches for his cigarettes ...’ having learned something new. on Indonesia’s wars in modern history, replete with Pieper never tries to glamorise his situation Samuel Zifchak is from Readings Carlton occupation of East hideous waste and relentless corruption. and he holds nothing back, examining the Timor and expose very worst parts of himself. He evolves SHY: A MEMOIR sex-trafficking rackets THE HOUSE ON from a sweet, dorky teenager who is in Sian Prior in Portugal, Jolliffe realised that by telling over his head, to someone darker and less CARNAVAL STREET stories of young women in distress, she was appealing: a damaged and destructive Text. PB. $32.99 Deborah Rodriguez also attempting to free her younger self from presence in the lives of those around him. As a well-known Bantam. PB. $29.99 the chains of being a ‘Forgotten Australian’. Pieper knows how to pace his journalist, The House on Carnaval book and shapes a compelling narrative broadcaster, teacher Street is a sea-change out of a messy life. At its heart, The and singer who has MY SALINGER YEAR memoir by the author Feel-Good Hit of the Year is a distinctly spent most of her Joanna Rakoff of international Australian story about a family – the career in the spotlight, Bloomsbury. PB. $27.99 bestseller The Little choices they make, the tragedies they face, it seems quite strange In 1996, the 23-year-old Coffee Shop of Kabul. how they fall apart, and how they slowly that Sian Prior’s first aspiring poet Joanna When her family faced put things back together. book should be all Rakoff took her first kidnap threats after the This is a book to be devoured about her shyness. job at one of New publication of that quickly and then reflected on slowly. It’s Perhaps more remarkable is that Prior’s York’s oldest literary book, Deborah intimate, raw and occasionally heart- discussion of what it means to be shy agencies and was Rodriguez was forced to leave behind her breaking. Pieper is a fiercely talented should be explored through memoir, a immediately swept up entire life in Kabul, eventually landing at a writer, and The Feel-Good Hit of the medium that, for the most part, requires into a world filled with seaside town in Mexico. Here, she hoped to Year stands as one of the best Australian the author to reveal detailed information titanic personalities find a way to create a life on her own terms. memoirs of the past few years. about their life and open their private, and legendary authors, personal world to the public. including the mysterious and iconic ‘Jerry’ Nina Kenwood is the online manager for THE INDEPENDENT But this isn’t an ordinary memoir. Salinger. My Salinger Year is both a Readings MEMBER FOR LYNE To begin, the contents page reads like coming-of-age story and a love letter to the Rob Oakeshott a stream of consciousness, spooling vanishing world of old-fashioned publishing. TRAVELLING WITHOUT A&U. PB. Was $35 down the page: ‘But Why’, ‘What If’, $29.95 GODS: A CHRIS ‘The Boys’, ‘Mistaken Identity’, ‘Mirror ELEANOR MARX WALLACE-CRABBE Mirror’. The book is split into two parts, Rachel Holmes When the results of the 2010 federal COMPANION with over 30 sections in the first and 16 Bloomsbury. HB. $49.99 in the second. This unusual fragmented elections became Cassandra Atherton Pioneering feminist structure allows for Prior to explore the known, Australia had MUP. PB. Was $40 Eleanor Marx was the complexity of shyness through a range their first hung $32.95 first woman to lead the of prose, from funny, short reflections in parliament for 40 In Travelling British dock workers’ ‘What’s That?’, where she discusses the years. Prime Minister without Gods, and gas workers’ trade disconnect between listener and speaker, Julia Gillard and Cassandra Atherton unions, provided the to interviews with psychologists, personal Leader of the has assembled an first English translation stories of social anxiety and the devastation Opposition Tony impressive collection of Flaubert’s Madame of a broken relationship, and childhood Abbott immediately set about wooing the of articles, photo- Bovary and memories of loss and longing. independents, which included Rob graphs, journal entries championed the This creative multiplicity is Oakeshott. In his candid memoir, and personal theatre of Henrik Ibsen, all while working best put to use when Prior splits herself Oakeshott shares his story of life in reflections that pay as secretary and researcher for her father, into ‘Shy Sian’ and ‘Professional Sian’ Australian politics over this time, from his tribute to the life and Karl Marx. Here, Rachel Holmes re-creates during her interviews with her mother, apprenticeship in the NSW parliament to work of Chris Wallace-Crabbe, a linchpin this nineteenth-century woman’s Professor Margot Prior. The interesting the final days of the Gillard government. of the Australian literary scene. Drawing on extraordinary life. READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 15

Australian Studies Cultural Studies

LAST BETS: A TRUE FUNEMPLOYED Fifteen-year-old Rebecca Budde is in love with Dave, but after one STORY OF GAMBLING, Justin Heazlewood glorious summer it’s all over—she and her family have to move to a MORALITY AND THE LAW Affirm. PB. $24.99 village with a puddle for a pond, and no excitement at all... Michaela McGuire What do you do? I’m a dancer. MUP. PB. $24.99 Well, not at first anyway. Very weird things are going on inside their Wow! Your life must be Like Michaela new house, and even stranger things are happening in the village at McGuire, I’ve so fun! Almost every artist has faced a night. There’s no Dave, but there are two ghosts, a pub, a dog and always deeply disliked Alex March, a dark and brooding artist, living in the Manor House casinos. When I was 18 conversation similar to down the road. His interest in Rebecca is both puzzlingp g and thrilling.g years old I lasted five this one. There is a weeks serving rum and great resistance among cokes to blackjack ‘non-artists’ to What on earth does any tables at Melbourne’s acknowledge the of it mean? Is it possible Crown casino. It was technicalities of an artist’s life. In his to love a ghost? And whatt the summer after high second book, Funemployed, Justin happens if he loves you Heazlewood outlines the intricacies of school, I was broke and my first shift back? finished at 4am. No clocks, no natural daily life for artists in Australia. light, and considerably more tracksuits Heazlewood provides an insightful and personal account of what it A funny, moving story and tears than tuxedos and martinis – about what it means McGuire’s memories of her time working means to live as an artist at different stages in a casino struck a chord with me right of life: What does it mean in university; to find love, lose love from her book’s prologue. Last Bets: A when you have to get a day job; when you and discover who you True Story of Gambling, Morality and the finally begin to think, Have I made it in are when you live in a Law is her attempt to clarify whatever it is this industry? village with no street about casinos that set her so ill at ease. His previous belief in the lights and a decidedly Specifically, the book investigates the 2011 capitalist fairytale is sorely challenged dark side. death of Anthony Dunning – a patron of through his own experiences and those of Crown – following a violent run-in with a other artists in Australia. Theoretically, if casino bouncer. you study hard and complete a university We read true crime, suggests degree, you deserve a full-time career, John Safran, because it ‘tells the story replete with car, castle and kids. But, when of how the world works’. Like Safran’s you’re spending full-time hours on your Murder in Mississippi, or Helen Garner’s art, racking up debt and using Centrelink Joe Cinque’s Consolation, Last Bets probes as a lifeline, it’s clear that your career the gap between ethics and the law in choice isn’t enough to pay rent. You’re not an accessible and engaging manner. employed, but you’re not unemployed, What I particularly enjoyed was the way so, what are you? Heazlewood’s answer: McGuire inserts herself into the story. funemployed. She’s an observant, intelligent narrator, While many have grappled with and succeeds in being both empathetic the question, Heazlewood’s response and analytic in her exchanges. Her here is unique: his use of diagrams to attempts to make sense of the disjuncture illustrate the correlation between having in Crown’s legal and moral obligations see no job, his dream job and his real job, or her interviewing an array of characters inserts of his messy scrawl (i.e. ‘Reasons invested in gambling culture: problem You Are Failing’), make his insights into gamblers, psychologists, casino priests. the arts industry personal. He draws a But it’s McGuire’s exchange with David line between a subjective and objective Walsh, founder of the Museum of Old account of the pitfalls and joy of being and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania, and an artist in Australia – undoubtedly, his arguably Australia’s most notorious experiences will hit home. gambler, that had me glued to the page. Savannah Indigo is from Readings Malvern Last Bets is gripping true-crime writing. I found it an unnerving but rewarding read, and an important book – Psychology for the light it sheds on the Dunning case, and Australia’s gambling culture in general. THE SKELETON Stella Charls is from Readings Carlton CUPBOARD Tanya Byron DRAGON’S TAIL: THE PanMac. PB. $29.99 LUCKY COUNTRY AFTER Clinical THE CHINA BOOM: psychologist QUARTERLY ESSAY 54 Tanya Byron is well et ready to unthink what you thought you knew Andrew Charlton known as a columnist, G and journey into the deep, dark Black Inc. PB. $19.99 television personality and adviser on mental depths of the Jurassic. Award- In this timely Quarterly health issues in the winning journalist John Pickrell Essay, Andrew UK. While she has reveals how dinosaurs developed Charlton demolishes flight and became the birds in been a psychologist for some myths about our backyards. He delves into over 20 years, The Australia’s long boom. the latest discoveries in China, Skeleton Cupboard focuses on her post- Around 2000, our the US, Europe and uncovers a graduate training and explores her early economy became thriving black market in fossils development as a professional. providentially tied to and infighting between dinosaur The reader follows Byron’s the supercharged rise hunters, plus the controversial professional growth through her work of China. As the boom fades, Charlton asks plan to use a chicken to bring with six clients. However, she explains whether we can make our own luck. Noting dinosaurs back from the dead. that these stories are entirely fictional that Australia has never held a strong – confidentiality requires that she not national strategy – a position that has disclose actual cases. Instead, she has allowed us to grasp floating opportunities, combined elements from a multitude of but also leaves us leveraged to circumstance patients she has treated over the years. – Charlton outlines a possible approach for While this is understandable, it left www.newsouthbooks.com.au the future, one which is poised to leave the me questioning the authenticity of the nation more exposed than ever. memoir overall. 16 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

Byron is very open about her development as a fledgling psychologist. History Science Meet In her introduction she hypothesises about the the dramatic moment she believes led to THE LOST LEGIONS OF SENSATION her career choice: ‘I first became fascinated Bookseller FROMELLES Thalma Lobel by the frontal lobes of the human brain Scribe. PB. $35 when I saw my grandmother’s sprayed Peter Barton across the skirting boards of the front room A&U. PB. $32.99 Leading psychologist Thalma Lobel of her dark and cluttered house. I was 15.’ The action at Savannah Indigo, demonstrates how a Byron refers frequently to the impact of Fromelles in July 1916 Readings Malvern her grandmother’s murder. She believes remains one of symphony of external the calm rationality that overtook her that Australia’s most stimuli exerts a day is the same skill that has benefited her catastrophic military constant influence on psychology practice. She is also challenged failures. Here, Peter the way our minds Why do you work in books? in her final placement, which sees her Barton dispels many a work: an aggressive When I was younger, I had a fascination working with substance abusers – her myth surrounding this negotiator can be with organising bookshelves. I would grandmother’s murderer was a drug- legendary battlefield, completely disarmed obsess over mine at home and reorganise affected ex-tenant. through investigating by holding a warm cup of tea; people are any shelves at bookshops that I thought The clients Byron writes about the interrogation of Anglo-Australian more likely to cheat on a test right after weren’t up to scratch (much to staff are diverse: a bereaved, anorexic 12-year- prisoners to the circumstances of the having taken a shower. Sensation reveals frustration). I think from around age 10, I old in a residential psychiatric unit; a ‘missing’ Pheasant Wood graves. Barton’s how shockingly susceptible we are to knew that I needed to work with books. sensory input. high-profile fashion designer coming research also brings new perspectives to What book would you happily spend a to terms with his AIDS diagnosis; a the writings of Charles Bean. weekend indoors with? Holocaust survivor battling dementia after Music I would very happily spend a weekend nursing his wife through the same decline. A GOOD PLACE TO HIDE obsessing over George Orwell’s 1984 or Byron describes her self-doubt as a young Peter Grose Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. If woman working with much older clients A&U. PB. $32.99 BURIED COUNTRY I’d had a particularly challenging week, and serious problems. Rewardingly, she A Good Place to Hide is Clinton Walker however, I would be happy to curl up on also reveals both her mistakes and the the story of how an Verse Chorus. PB. $45 the couch with the Harry Potter series. satisfying ‘aha’ moments as she grows in isolated community in Aboriginal country Describe your own taste in books. knowledge and confidence. the upper reaches of music has a long and Eclectic and mood-dependent. I’ve been Annie Condon is from Readings Hawthorn the Loire Valley rich tradition, from known to read a lot of trashy vampire conspired to save the 1950s pioneers such as novels after major assessments, but I’m lives of 3500 Jews Jimmy Little and always looking for something that changes Politics under the noses of the Auriel Andrew up to the way I think. I look for books that Germans and the contemporary inspire me to think beyond the pages. soldiers of Vichy, performers Roger Knox and Troy Cassar- DEMOKRASI: INDONESIA France. Peter Grose reveals the pacifist Name a book that has changed the way Daley. Packed with rare photographs and you think, in ways small or large. IN THE 21ST CENTURY Protestant pastor who broke laws and including a detailed discography, Buried Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Every time I Hamish McDonald defied orders and the 18-year-old Jewish Country offers a fascinating account of the revisit it, I find a new concept that I want Black Inc. PB. $29.99 boy from Nice who forged 5000 sets of false growth of this vital force in Aboriginal to explore. Recently I have been examining identity papers, and tells the story of a Indonesia, a nation of culture and its role in changing Australian the parallels the book draws with cosmetic community who offered sanctuary and thousands of islands attitudes to race. use in the twenty-first century. I’m also solidarity to people in desperate need. and almost 250 million looking at different adaptions of the novel people, has long been WORLD’S BEST JAZZ – Gris Grimly’s Frankenstein is pretty one of Australia’s CLUB fantastic! The first piece of academic important strategic Travel Writing David James work I had published was written on partners, and the Major Street. HB. $49.95 Frankenstein, so it also represents a relationship has CARSICK Bennetts Lane has been milestone for me. become closer – if John Waters occasionally fraught – the most influential Your job entails recommending good Constable & Robinson. PB. $24.99 jazz music venue in reads: how do you balance personal taste under President Susilo Bambang with customer nous? Yudhoyono. Now rapidly modernising, Cult legend John Australia for over two This is something I’ve definitely had to Indonesia is, like China before it, becoming Waters has decided to decades, featuring learn through my time at Readings. I tend a major player on the global stage. It is a put his life on the line. performances from to latch on to a book and recommend it force in the world – but for what? In Armed with nothing local and international to everyone I talk to. But, when you’re Demokrasi, award-winning Asia-Pacific more than wit, a greats – including two impromptu shows talking books all day, or listening to other journalist Hamish McDonald offers an pencil-thin moustache by rock legend Prince. Writer and musician people talking books, you pick up a lot of introduction to the modern history and and a cardboard sign David James tells the club’s story from its information. You learn what books are politics of this fascinating country. that reads ‘I’m not a opening in 1992, exploring its relationship psycho’, he hitches with the city of Melbourne, the media and similar to others in tone, content or style, rides from Baltimore to jazz educators. As a bonus for Readings’ and can make recommendations based on Philosophy San Francisco, braving lonely roads and customers, each book is accompanied by a that. I think the most important thing is to treacherous drivers. Along the way, he four-track CD, composed by Bennetts Lane be authentic in your recommendations. I fantasises about the best and worst possible owner Michael Tortoni. can tell customers about a book they might THE QUEST FOR A scenarios. Carsick is an unforgettable like based on previous reads, but then MORAL COMPASS vacation with a wickedly funny companion again, so can Amazon. I think the beauty Kenan Malik – and a celebration of America’s weird, Humour of working and shopping at a place like Readings is that it brings together many Atlantic. PB. $32.99 astonishing and most generous citizens. very interesting people, all of whom have Kenan Malik explores THE PORTLANDIA different tastes and can find the ‘hidden the history of moral ITALIAN WAYS ACTIVITY BOOK gems’. I’m very lucky that I can use such a thought as it has Tim Parks Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein wealth of information when I’m trying to developed over three Harvill Secker. PB. $19.99 & Jonathan Krisel find the right read for a customer. millennia, from Tim Parks’ wry McSweeney’s. SB. $36.99 Homer’s Greece to accounts of his train What’s the best book you’ve read lately? Mao’s China, from journeys across the Much like a cool high Anyone who spends more than five ancient India to country reveal what he school that prefers a minutes with me hears me mention Jaclyn modern America. The calls the ‘charmingly sweat lodge to the Moriarty (several times). A Corner of White Quest for a Moral irritating dystopian traditional classroom, is absolutely unique and takes me to an Compass shares the stories of the great paradise’ of Italy. The Portlandia Activity incredible world. I tend to recommend it philosophers, while also challenging many Through memorable Book is a compendium to every customer, even if they are after of our most cherished moral beliefs to show encounters with of guaranteed something else entirely. I think it’s a book how social needs and political desires have conductors and ticket enrichment for the that everyone should read. A more recent shaped moral thinking. It is a history of the collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars Pacific Northwestern part of your psyche. release that I’ve loved is Marina Keegan’s world told through the history of moral and lovers, gypsies and immigrants, Parks Activities here include ‘How to Crowdfund collection of short stories and essays, The thought, and a history of moral thought explores how the railways reflect Italians’ Your Baby’, ‘Punk Paint By Numbers’, Opposite of Loneliness. It has such beautiful that casts new light on global history. sense of themselves and their culture. ‘Terrarium Foraging’, and so much more. and honest writing. READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 17

Art & Design declamations and allegorical tales. Here are Food & Gardening jump on board because, quite simply, it’s all recipes for ice-cream on the moon, candied very impressive. This issue’s theme is ‘street food’ and I was particularly taken with Margaret Snowdon atmospheric electricities, nocturnal love with Chris Gordon feasts, sculpted meats, an argument for with the ‘Sausage Quest’ section complied abolishing pasta: served with provocation by Ryan Healey and Peter Meehan. Not B IS FOR BAUHAUS and/or amusement. You may also like 100 STÉPHANE REYNAUD’S only do these two blokes recount the Deyan Sudjic Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to PIES AND TARTS history of the street sausage in lively detail, Particular Books. HB. $39.99 the Stuckists (Penguin. PB. $26.95). Stéphane Reynaud they also sweep across the world naming The director of Murdoch. HB. $49.99 every ‘street sausage’ they can find. For London’s Design ANA MENDIETA: SHE Ladies and gentlemen, example, Australia has mention of the Museum and author of GOT LOVE he’s back! All of those Bunning sausage sizzle, Berlin the The Language of Things Beatrice Mertz & Olga Gambari that loved Pork and currywurst and Russia – pigs in a blanket. I and The Edifice (eds) Sons will equally love am presuming you are reading this column Complex presents an A Skira. HB. $80 Stéphane Reynaud’s because you love food and food writing and if so, this issue of Lucky Peach will bring to Z of the modern In her productive yet ode to all things crusty. you hours of joy. world – from short life, Ana This cookbook has authenticity to zips. recipes for the peasant Mendieta experimented ALQUIMIE, EDITION 2 Somewhere between a with a variety of media, inside us all, including dictionary and an each time including her rabbit pies and pheasant tarts. There are Josh Elias (ed.) autobiography, Deyan Sudjic writes with a own image into the recipes for the family chef too, like pumpkin Alquimie. PB. $18 personal take on a variety of subjects: from work and every time and chicken pies. It most certainly has Another foodie drinking martinis at Adolf Loos’ American looking for answers, which she would recipes for dessert lovers with two simple publication to look for, Bar in Vienna, to viewing the world from search for not only in the realm of tradition words: apple strudel. And it especially has though this time closer the rear-view mirror of Grand Theft Auto V. but in everything that links our human recipes for late nights curled up with a to home, is Alquimie. roots to the spiritual. Her work and legacy roaring fire, a bottle of red wine and the Collectable and ITALIAN FUTURISM, has increasingly garnered global attention smell of crusty, buttery pastry drifting knowledgeable, this is 1909–1944: and recognition. The works in this volume through your home. Reynaud has done it a new magazine made RECONSTRUCTING THE were created between 1972 and 1985. again with yet another bible of the perfect locally in Richmond UNIVERSE one pot ... oops ... one pie wonders. that celebrates the old, the new, the tasty and the very best of Vivien Greene (ed.) Activity & How-to Books THE LAND WHERE wine and food. The publication is perfect Guggenheim. HB. $80 LEMONS GROW: THE for you if you love discovering the story Italian Futurism was a ‘behind the taste’ and learning about how dynamic and intriguing SHOW YOUR WORK! STORY OF ITALY AND ITS CITRUS FRUIT innovative products are created. The movement, and the Austin Kleon second edition has recently been released recent interest in the Workman. PB. $19.95 Helena Attlee and features writing on absinthe, milk and Futurists is welcome. The beauty of Austin Particular Books. HB. $39.99 the search for the perfect claret. I Given the movement Kleon’s immensely The Land Where especially enjoyed the piece titled ‘Meat founder F.T. Marinetti’s popular first book, Lemons Grow is a true and Greet’ which shares advice on belief in the cleansing Steal Like an Artist, was all-rounder of a book matching wine to cuts of meat. nature of war and his ability to verbalise, with travel stories, misogynistic attitude, it was interesting that in a very accessible history, recipes, FLAVOURS OF URBAN the fascinating book Feminine Futures from way, the multifarious gardening tips and MELBOURNE Les Presses Du Réel (HB. $115) appeared aspects of the creative process, both gorgeous pictures of Jonette George (ed.) first. Feminine Futures features Valentine de mundane and ephemeral. Student or old Italian landscaping and Smudge Publishing. HB. Was $69.99 Saint-Point, who responded to Marinetti’s hand, there was a helpful pointer to be green hills – all centred $59.99. For a limited time only Futurist Manifesto with the Manifesto of found, or a fuzzy area to be clarified. His on a particular type of Available 10 June Futurist Woman, along with many other follow-up also stresses sharing (with fruit. Helena Attlee sets out to explore the female performers and artists who were perhaps a bit of borrowing/stealing), and curious past of citrus and its enduring After the success of attracted to the movement. You may also the focus is as the title suggests – getting resonance in the Italian imagination and Flavours of Melbourne, have noticed the stylish packaging of some your work out there and recognised. culture. Certainly, travellers have always there was good reason Aesop products with a futurist theme. been thrilled by the sight of citrus in Italy, to publish a sequel to Italian Futurism was published THE 1000 DOT-TO-DOT where dark leaves and bright fruit seem to showcase Melbourne’s to accompany the exhibition of the same BOOKS: CITYSCAPES & charge the landscape, making the trees thriving urban food name, and this volume endeavours to ANIMALS symbols of a sun-soaked, poetic vision of scene. Flavours of convey the spirit of the movement in all its the country. Frequently, when I’m at a Urban Melbourne Thomas Pavitte complexity. The book features essays by nursery buying plants for my tiny little showcases the profound ebbs and flows of nearly 30 authors, homing in on specific Ilex Press. PB. $19.95 each allotment I like to think back to my own styles and cultures within the cafe and artists, series and moments. With over 300 If you want to relax/ time spent in that exotic land and remind restaurant culture in this capital city of illustrations of works created throughout play with some pencils myself that the climate over there is very food. Here is a fusion of cultures flourishing the duration of the movement – from in your hand and similar to the climate here in Victoria. Such together, as well as side-by-side. It is hard to its inception with Marinetti’s Futurist you’ve joined all the a reminder gives me hope for my own lime put a finger on the pulse, let alone describe Manifesto in 1909, through to its demise at dots of the fab and lemon tees, and certainly makes my the free-fall movement that the city’s the end of World War II – the exhibition portraits in the rosemary taste just that little bit sweeter. If suburbs are experiencing today. Beautiful catalogue encompasses not only painting original 1000 Dot-To- you too are a fan of travel writing or indeed photography, history, recipes, street art, and sculpture, but also architecture, Dot Book, Thomas blood oranges, look no further than the restaurants and bars all come together. design, fashion, photography, advertising, Pavitte has created two wonderful acidity of this book. publications, music and performance. more (Cityscapes is pictured here), with a giant, poster-sized Mona Lisa dot-to-dot LUCKY PEACH, ISSUE 10: Cookbook Classic THE FUTURIST on the way. STREET FOOD COOKBOOK THE COOK’S COMPANION DRAW CATS & DRAW Peter Meehan, David Chang & F.T. Marinetti Chris Ying (eds.) DOGS IN 15 MINUTES Stephanie Alexander Penguin Modern Classics. PB. $22.99 Lucky Peah. PB. $19.99 Lantern. HB. Was $130 Available late June Jake Spicer This quarterly journal $89.99 Ilex Press. PB. $19.95 each For a further taste of of food and writing I refer to this book things Futurist, released You’ve read the tips and really is a peach. Lucky often for inspiration, as a Penguin Modern pointers, you’ve Peach is funny, for example, I may read Classic is this guide to limbered up by joining informative and a little the chapter on cabbage eating in sandpaper the dots and now it’s kooky. Published in and from there, decide outfits while being time to open the new New York, the creators on a particular style of sprayed with various sketchbook and make pride themselves on cooking to get started. aromas and possibly not some marks. Jake having a global view of food trends and Then I’ll add a grain allowed to use your Spicer’s first book was along with the fun layout of photos, here, or prepare a hands. (Was this book Draw Faces in 15 Minutes, but nearly every cartoons and recipes, there are interesting sauce there – you get the picture. More in Heston’s childhood bookcase?) Part well-known artist has a stash of pet portraits essays and explanations for foodie than a cookbook, The Cook’s Companion is a manifesto, part artistic joke, The Futurist somewhere, so why not begin your own movements and other such things. Any wonderful reference book and said to be Cookbook is a collection of experiments, collection of feline and canine beauties? person worth their culinary weight should found in over 500,000 Australian homes. 18 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

THE PERFECT PET: THE TINKLERS Picture Books THREE BOOK 4 LET’S PLAY M.C. Badger Gabriel Alborozo Hardie Grant. PB. $12.95 learn A&U. HB. $22.99 The Tinklers are finally getting a pet! They have done a lot of hard things to From the author of Let’s Paint show they’re ready for one. They’ve comes a delightful romp eaten an extra bowl of ice-cream every through the instruments of the French! day, cleaned their teeth while hopping orchestra, their unique sounds and on one foot and one a very good job of the colours that seem to magically making a mess. But can they agree on arise from them. There’s plenty of which pet would be best? action, with each instrument producing a different colour and shape that floats across the page until they all come together at the end to make beautiful music. This delightful picture book is Middle Fiction cheeky, fun and just a little bit educational. It’s a fabulous introduction to musical instruments for FIGGY IN THE WORLD children aged 2 to 4. Tamsin Janu Angela Crocombe is from Readings St Kilda Omnibus. PB. $15.99 ourses Figgy has the most fantastic c IMAGINE A CITY outlook on life. She really only has start July 7 Elise Hurst one complaint, and that’s her unusual Omnibus. HB. $24.99 name. The rest of her considerable energy is spent pondering the big wide Elise Hurst’s masterful use of world, until one day her thoughts are pen and ink has created an taken over by a conversation she atmospheric world where mysterious overhears in which she learns that her happenings occur while an adult and beloved grandmother, who’s raised her, two children take a trip to town. As is very sick. So begins Figgy’s quest to they walk through the city, visiting a travel from Ghana to America, where she’s heard she can get gallery, garden, museum and AllianceFrançaise the best medicine. Her only companions are her pet goat and bookshop, magical and unexpected de Melbourne a boy her age who becomes like a brother. things enchant them. Hurst’s finely We teach French Written by a young Australian who has worked detailed, black ink pictures have an with children in Ghana, this really is an impressive debut. old-world feel and invite the reader to look very closely to Figgy’s rationalisations about the world are a hundred fully appreciate them. Children’s minds are open to the times nicer than the truth – she’s a charming Pollyanna- French Language & Cultural Centre since 1890 inexplicable and they will find plenty here to tantalise Not-for-profit Australian association type who will melt hearts. Her world is harsh but she their imaginations. For ages 3 and up. puts a positive spin on everything. Figgy in the World is (03) 95253463 Alexa Dretzke is from Readings Hawthorn uplifting and funny, and highly recommended as a family read or independently for ages 8 and up. afmelbourne.com.au I AM COW HEAR ME MOO Emily Gale is from Readings Carlton Jill Esbaum & Gus Gordon (illus.) Viking. HB. $24.99 THE WATER CASTLE Nadine is a remarkable cow who’s Megan Frazer Blakemore afraid of absolutely nothing; or so she Bloomsbury. PB. $12.99 claims. She’s a bit of a show-off, really, This is a story about an ancient and when her friends take her up on Story time castle riddled with secret her offer of a tour through the woods, passageways, mysterious sounds and READINGS CARLTON Nadine is in her element. Then night strange lights. It’s also the story of Mondays 11am – 11.30am falls, and when her friends leave desperate people searching for the Nadine is left to explore a dark cave all Fountain of Youth. When Price, READINGS ST KILDA on her own. Ephraim and Brynn move to an old Saturdays 10.30am – 11am castle after their father has a stroke, they are thrust into the middle of a READINGS MALVERN Junior Fiction century-old feud, family secrets and a Thursdays 10.30am – 11am EVEN WEIRDER!: WEIRDO BOOK 2 town where everyone is just a little bit smarter and stronger than normal. Could it have something to do with Each week, Readings’ staff will Anh Do & Jules Faber (illus.) the crumbling mansion – the Water Castle? And did their read their favourite picture Scholastic. PB. Was $14.99 books (new or classic) for pre- strange ancestor, Orlando Appledore, really discover $11.99 school children (0 - 6 years old). magical properties in the water? This book has some big Story time is free and there’s no Weir’s back and he’s even weirder! But topics: faith vs. science, overcoming rivalries passed down need to book. it’s not just Weir who’s weird, it’s his generations, and the race to discover the North Pole. With whole family. Not even their pet bird a dual narrative that places us both in 1908 and the is normal. How will he keep cool with present day, this is a fascinating story for confident For half an hour after a school trip to the zoo coming up and readers aged 10 and up. Angela Crocombe Story Time, Bella’s birthday party? It won’t be easy Readings … but it will be funny! offers a 20% JIM’S LION discount off Russell Hoban & Alexis Decon (illus.) all full-priced Walker. HB. $19.95 children’s books. There are some books where, QUEEN BEE: ANGELA NICELY Please note: all children though you understand the must be accompanied by BOOK 2 central idea, there are aspects that are an adult as this is not a David Roberts & Alan MacDonald only tenuously interpreted and child-minding service. Egmont. PB. $9.95 require re-readings. Intriguingly, these are precisely the books that stay Angela Nicely might look like she's with you. Jim’s Lion is about made of sugar and spice and all things Join in on the ‘Thomas’ fun confronting your fears. Jim is sick and nice, but nothing could be further from with a special Thomas the Tank scared that if he has an operation he the truth! Queen Bee features three Engine themed may not find his way back to wickedly funny stories about Angela. storytime ! consciousness – his doctor worries that his fear will not Whether she’s matchmaking her give him the best chances of recovery. A sympathetic Readings St Kilda, teachers, flogging homemade lemonade nurse helps Jim to visualise a way to overcome his Sat 21 June or dealing with the Ugly Sisters, she anxieties. The graphic sequences show Jim’s lion, the 10.30am – 11am. always has an answer for everything. animal who comes to him in his dreams and during his READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 19

Book of the Month LOYAL CREATURES Morris Gleitzman Viking. PB. $19.99 It’s 1914 and 16-year-old Frank and his dad volunteer for war; Frank’s excitement is palpable as the pair set sail for a great adventure in Egypt. But father and son are swiftly parted as Dad is deployed to Gallipoli. Bereft of his father’s council and companionship, Frank finds camaraderie and loyalty among the members of his brigade as they head into the desert to engage the enemy. Nothing can prepare young Frank for the horror of war or the grief of friendship lost, but throughout this experience, Frank’s trusty companion Daisy, his loyal horse, is steadfast. It’s through his conversations with Daisy that Frank reveals his frustrations and fears, and Graphic Novel ultimately his incredible courage and resolve. Loyal Creatures is a remarkable story based on and inspired by historical fact. It’s a MESSENGER: THE LEGEND OF powerfully moving drama, in which Morris Gleitzman captures the smell and heat of JOAN OF ARC the desert terrain, the fear and mayhem of war, the spirit of the larrikin Australian and the bond between men and their horses. Yet its drama is infused with a dry Aussie Tony Lee & Sam Hart (illus.) humour – I laughed and cried. It’s unforgettable. Read it with a box of tissues by Walker. PB. $22.95 your side. Highly recommended for ages 9 and up. This is a fascinating introduction to the iconic figure of Joan of Athina Clarke is from Readings Malvern Arc in a graphic format. From her youth as a normal child who loved to dance around the fairy tree, the story shows her first vision from God at the age of 13 and how this changed her life and the future of France. Joan’s strength of belief in herself and her visions, her determination and her prowess as a warrior leading an army are all depicted elegantly and effectively. operation and leads him safely through many a Joan really comes to life as a complex person, rather than frightening situation, as a potent and palpable presence. a tedious figure in history. This is an excellent addition to Alexis Deacon’s pictures fully explore the menace of the graphic series by Tony Lee and Sam Hart, which Jim’s fears, and his lion is a truly magnificent and loyal brings to life warriors and rebels, including Robin Hood beast. Enigmatic and challenging, Jim’s Lion is and King Arthur. All of them are suitable for readers aged ultimately a rewarding read. For ages 7 and up. AD New 10 to adult. Angela Crocombe DISAPPEARING ACT James Moloney Novelty HarperCollins. PB. $14.99 STEPHEN BIESTY’S GIANT Matt Cooper is twelve, and spends Kids’ VEHICLES quite a bit of his time honing his magic skills and tricks. He doesn’t realise Stephen Biesty that his great-grandfather, Mattheus Walker. HB. $24.95 Coperneau, was a professional See inside some of the world’s most magician whose career came to a enormous vehicles in this amazing disastrous end when a trick he Books lift-the-flap book. Discover eight performed backfired spectacularly. monster machines: from the double- What neither Matt nor Mattheus queen, the prime minister and Harry Styles from One decker airbus to the largest realise is that there’s an even older Direction! A hilarious new series. submarine on earth. Little engineers story behind the failure of Mattheus’ ‘disappearing trick’ will love finding out about motors, periscopes, rocket and a tragic romance is at the bottom of it all. Non-Fiction engines and giant propellers in this fact-packed guide. KELSEY AND THE QUEST OF THE PORCELAIN DOLL REMEMBERED BY HEART: AN Rosanne Hawke ANTHOLOGY OF INDIGENOUS Classic of the Month UQP. PB. $14.95 WRITING Kelsey is in Pakistan while her Mum Sally Morgan (ed.) PIPPI LONGSTOCKING and Dad are busy helping flood victims. Fremantle. PB. $17.99 Astrid Lindgren & Lauren Child (illus.) She misses her friends, but most of all From life in the desert to growing up OUP. PB. $20.95 she misses Nanna Rose. Luckily, Kelsey on a mission, enduring devastating When I was choosing a book can talk to Nanna on Skype. To help policies in the 1930s to bravely to read as a kid, I cared not a Kelsey feel better, they create a story seizing new opportunities in the jot about the gender of the about a porcelain doll called Amy Jo 1960s, these are 15 true stories protagonist, or what the cover who wants to find someone to love her. reflecting a diverse range of looked like. I didn’t even notice This is a captivating story of adversity, Aboriginal Australian experiences. books were categorised into adventure and love. genres until my teens. All I ever required of a book was that the HOW HARRY RIDDLES MADE A child had no parents. It sounds MEGA-AMAZING ZOMBIE MOVIE MEET DOUGLAS MAWSON morbid, I know, but who can honestly tell me it’s Simon Mayle Mike Dumbleton & Snip Green (illus.) possible to go on marvellous adventures with your HarperCollins. PB. $14.99 Random House. HB. $24.99 mum telling you to go to bed, or to quit rolling biscuit dough on the kitchen floor? Harry ‘Shoutykid’ Riddles has This is part of a picture book series I was ever so envious of Pippi Longstocking. problems: he needs money to make his about the extraordinary men and She lives alone in a big house with a horse and a movie, his dad needs a job before they women who have shaped Australia’s monkey; she doesn’t have to go to school and she’s full lose their home, and the school play history, including the great Antarctic of fantastical stories about shipwrecks and a man with will end in disaster unless there are explorer, Sir Douglas Mawson, who ears so big he could crawl under them in the rain! She some major changes to the leading led the first Australian expedition to is as much a hero to adult-me as she was to child-me. actors! But Harry isn’t giving up easily the Antarctic. Meet Douglas Mawson tells the story of – he decides to write to anyone who how Mawson survived the dangers and challenges of the Dani Solomon is from Readings Carlton might be able to help, including the frozen continent. 20 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

THE AGE OF GIVE ME HIDE & SEEK men – American and British museum CHIVALRY EXCESS OF IT MELBOURNE directors, curators, art historians and others – risked their lives to prevent these Explore Australia Hywel Williams Richard Gill objects being found, and destroyed. This HB. Was $49.99 HB. Was $49.95 Box set. Was $49.95 account follows six of them and their Now $14.95 Now $14.95 Now $19.95 impossible mission to save the world’s In a sequence of Richard Gill’s career has This box set is ideal great art. scholarly but accessible taken him from a music for any Melburnian articles – accompanied by an array of teacher in Sydney’s interested in discovering the city’s best MUSIC hidden places, containing four of the Hide beautiful and authentic images of the era, western suburbs to the music director of Andrew Zuckerman plus timelines, maps, boxed features and the Victorian Opera, and along the way seen & Seek Melbourne books on shopping, PB. Was $70 display quotes – distinguished historian him involved with almost every major opera eating, bars and quirky activities. The set Now $24.95 Hywel Williams sheds revelatory light on company and orchestra in Australia. In this also includes a puzzle that when complete, every aspect of a rich and complex period memoir Gill traces his life from school reveals another hidden place in Melbourne. Following the highly of European history. days to the highs, and lows, of conducting acclaimed Wisdom, and directing an opera company. THE GOLDEN Andrew Zuckerman now turns his unique CATHERINE EMPIRE photographic perspective to music. This book and film includes 50 eminent THE GREAT COSMOS Hugh Thomas musicians, composers and producers, Robert K. Massie Giles Sparrow & HB. Was $49.95 including Laurie Anderson, Afrika Dava Sobel Now $19.95 PB. Was $49.95 Bambaataa, Common, David Crosby, Philip Now $17.95 HB. Was $49.95 Hugh Thomas shares Glass, Herbie Hancock, Kid Rock, Lenny Now $29.95 a riveting narrative of The Pulitzer Prize- Kravitz, Ziggy Marley, Ozzy Osbourne and winning author Cosmos is a majestic exploration, progress and Iggy Pop. returns with another account of the ultimate plunder in his account of Spain, through masterpiece of narrative biography, the journey – a voyage from our 1522 to 1566. His lively prose extraordinary story of an obscure young home planet to the edge brings to life King Charles V ONCE BEFORE German princess who travelled to Russia of the universe and the and the bold conquistadors TIME at fourteen and rose to become one of beginning of time. The who expanded the Martin Bojowald vault of stars that the most remarkable, powerful, and Spanish empire with HB. Was $39.95 emblazon the nights captivating women in history. Robert passion and fury. Now $13.95 are an infinitesimal A compulsively K. Massie has a rare genius for finding In 2000, a 27-year- fraction of the readable saga of and expressing the human drama in old post-doctorate at hundreds of billions kings and conquests, extraordinary lives and her story is Pennsylvania State that inhabit our own, Bargain armies and armadas, superbly told here. University used a relatively new theory and other galaxies. dominance and power, called loop quantum gravity – a cunning Cosmos explores The Golden Empire is a THE ART OF combination of Einstein’s theory of gravity this dizzying celestial crowning achievement Table with quantum mechanics – to create AUSTRALIA: panorama one step at a from the Spanish world’s a simple model of the universe. Loop VOLUME ONE time, illustrating the planets, foremost historian. quantum cosmology was born, and with it, John McDonald moons, stars, nebulae, white a theory that illuminated the very birth of dwarfs, black holes and other exotica that HB. Was $125 THE GREAT the universe. Now $34.95 populate the skies, through spectacular MATHE- photographs. In this first volume of a brilliant new MATICAL ROME history of Australian art, John McDonald Robert Hughes takes us from the times of pre-history, 40 GREAT PROBLEMS settlement and exploration, to the end WALKS IN Ian Stewart PB. Was $49.95 of the colonial era. Along with in-depth AUSTRALIA PB. Was $32.99 Now $19.95 Now $12.95 From Robert Hughes, discussions of major works, the narrative Tyrone Thomas & teems with characters and anecdotes from There are some one of the greatest art Andrew Close the era of the First Fleet to that of the mathematical problems whose significance and cultural critics of our Australian Impressionists. PB. Was $32.95 goes beyond the ordinary, like Fermat’s time, comes a sprawling, Now $12.95 Last Theorem or Goldbach’s Conjecture. comprehensive history of Rome – as city, CITIZEN Tyrone Thomas and Andrew Close have In The Great Mathematical Problems Ian as empire, and, crucially, as an origin of LABILLAR- gathered together the best walking Stewart explains why these problems Western art and civilization. Equal parts destinations Australia has to offer matter, guiding readers into this mysterious idolising, blasphemous, outraged and DIERE including all the classics as well as lesser- and exciting world to show how modern awestruck, Rome is a portrait of the Eternal Edward Duyker known gems such as ‘the Breadknife’, mathematicians constantly rise to the City as only Hughes could paint it. HB. Was $29.95 ‘Mount Feathertop’, ‘Kings Canyon’ and challenges set by their predecessors. Now $13.95 ‘South Molle Island’. Sorted by state, their THE STORY OF Jacques-Julien Houtou selection of forty walks range from easy HITCH-22 THE de Labillardière was to hard, and embrace a broad spectrum of landscapes ranging from deserts and Christopher MELBOURNE one of the great traveller-naturalists Hitchens of the eighteenth century. To write his rainforests, to spectacular islands and CUP HB. Was $45 biography, Edward Duyker revisited many coastal areas. Detailed directions, notes Stephen Howell (ed.) Now $16.95 of the naturalist’s landfalls around the and time estimates will enable readers to HB. Was $50 world, and also examined a wide range of tackle each walk with confidence. These are the acidic, Now $15.95 hilarious, confessional archival and museum collections to piece This commemorative publication, with and provocative together Labillardière’s correspondence TOP WALKS IN writing by racing’s best contributors, memoirs of Christopher Hitchens, and observations. The result reveals a NEW SOUTH covers the key events in the history of the a widely published polemicist and committed republican who was shaped by Melbourne Cup, from its conception as WALES commentator. His originality, bravery, the turbulent years of revolutionary and an Australia-only race to its evolution to a Ken Eastwood range and wit made him first a leading Napoleonic France. prominent world-wide event. PB. Was $32.95 iconoclast of the political left, and then THE EMPEROR Now $12.95 later a formidable advocate of secular New South Wales offers liberalism. Hitch-22 is an indispensable TENDER: OF ALL some of the best bushwalks in Australia, companion to the life and thought of an VOLUME I & II MALADIES with fascinating natural and man-made outstanding political writer. Nigel Slater Siddhartha treasures hidden along its tracks and HB. Was $89.99 Mukherjee trails: World Heritage-listed rainforests, MONUMENTS Now $24.95 PB. Was $29.95 convict relics, colonies of wombats, MEN This limited edition Now $13.95 the largest area of movable sand on the Robert M. Edsel includes both volumes east coast and a mountain that has been This profoundly HB. Was $45 of Nigel Slater’s Tender. burning for 6000 years. Experienced humane ‘biography’ of cancer tracks its Now $16.95 A project that grew from his vegetable first documented appearances thousands travel writer Ken Eastwood reveals walks patch and took five years to write, Tender that take you across surprising terrains As Adolf Hitler was of years ago, through to the epic battles attempting to take over is both a memoir and a collection of over of the twentieth-century to cure, control such as snow-covered mountains, volcanic 500 recipes. This definitive guide for landscapes, or hard-to-find remote the western world, his and conquer it, and onto a radical new armies were also methodically seeking out cooking with vegetables and fruit attests understanding of its essence. Physician, beaches. Each walk includes detailed to Slater’s position as one of Britain’s trail information, a map, photographs and the finest treasures in Europe. So, in a race researcher and science writer, Siddhartha against time, a special force of monuments finest food writer. Mukherjee examines the disease with a beautiful illustrations by Guy Troughton cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s and David Mackay of fauna and flora that perspective and a biographer’s passion. you’re likely to see along the way. New books are regularly added to our website – visit the bargains page at readings.com.au for more. READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 21

New Film & TV CALL THE MIDWIFE: SEASON 3 DVD of the Month with Lou Fulco $39.95. Season 1–3 boxset $79.95 UTOPIA Released 4 June THE GREAT BEAUTY This popular BBC drama is a $29.95 $34.95 captivating blend of period Released 4 June Following his hard-hitting charm with insightful social The opening scenes of The Great Beauty give you a double documentary The War You commentary, following the helping of Rome, with Rome on top: gardens, monuments, Don’t See, veteran work of the midwives and cloisters, statuary, and a disco party next to the Colosseum. And all Australian journalist John nuns of a nursing convent of this drenched in sunshine, or in shining neon. At the party, we’re Pilger’s new film is a rare located within the deprived led right up to Jep Gambardella, who is smiling, smoking, arching and powerful insight into a Poplar district of London’s his back, and wiggling his fingers to the music. Jep used to be a secret Australia. Epic in its desperately poor East End. The third season writer – now he’s addicted to sightseeing, fine clothes, and ‘pussy.’ Toni Servillo, in an production, scope and revelations, Utopia transports viewers to 1959, the eve of the extraordinarily good performance, plays Jep as genial, slightly bored, slightly careless, places Aboriginal Australia’s dispossession Swinging Sixties where the winds of change and with the smugness of that rarest of men: the sexually successful 65-year-old. and third-world living conditions on the are sweeping through the country and the Sometimes The Great Beauty gets too hungry for a quick visual surprise, or a global stage, and reveals how apartheid is residents of Nonnatus House are facing too easy bit of contrast: a dwarf asleep on a rooftop; or, in an amphitheatre, a sudden, deep within Australia’s past and present. some momentous changes of their own. inexplicable giraffe. The movie is much, much better when it stays closer to its INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS characters, and makes them say – to our surprise, or even shock – that they are in great 12 YEARS A SLAVE pain. No matter how many times we are told, it can still surprise us, it will never stop $39.95 $39.95 surprising us, that the rich, the cultured, the leisurely, can be so, so miserable. Luxe, This latest offering from Released 4 June volupté et misère. the Coen Brothers follows The winner of three The Great Beauty can be taken as a kind of summary, not just of Rome but a week in the life of a young Academy Awards including all of Italy; a place so stuffed full of old beauty that the only relief it can get from folk singer. Together with Best Picture, and directed its monuments is a bunga bunga party. But the movie is also after something else: it his cat and guitar, Llewyn by British filmmaker Steve worships beauty – the closing credits are some of the most slowly gorgeous you will Davis navigates the McQueen, 12 Years a Slave ever see – but it also shows you that everyone, no matter where they are, gets their Greenwich Village folk is an adaptation of Solomon share of strong, bitter human pain. scene of 1961, struggling to make it as a Northup’s 1853 memoir, the Sean O’Beirne is the events coordinator for Readings musician against insurmountable obstacles story of how, as a New York State-born free – some of his own making. Inside Llewyn African American man, he was kidnapped Davis is the Coen’s fourth collaboration and sold into slavery. The film has been higher ratings than the president in several with music producer T Bone Burnett and THE WOLF OF WALL particularly praised for stunning popularity polls, which she hopes will boost resides easily in the tradition of their STREET performances from Chiwetel Ejiofor, her influence and help her carry favour with much-loved O Brother, Where Art Thou? $39.95 Lupita Nyong’o and Michael Fassbender, the chief executive. Unfortunately, despite The Wolf of Wall Street is and for providing a compelling look at her best intentions, her actions continue to based on the true story of ORANGE IS THE NEW American slavery. result in unexpectedly catastrophic – albeit Jordan Belfort, tracking his BLACK: SEASON 1 very funny – consequences. rise from a wealthy Long $39.95 HER Island stockbroker to his $39.95 NYMPHOMANIAC : Based on Piper Kerman’s eventual downfall and arrest. From Spike Jonze comes an acclaimed memoir of the Directed by Martin Scorsese VOL I & VOL II original love story set in a same name, Orange Is the and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the film $39.95 each futuristic version of Los New Black is a sharp, blackly was nominated for five Academy Awards. Released 11 June funny series. When Piper Angeles. Heartbroken after This latest controversial Chapman – co-owner of an the end of a long relationship, VEEP: SEASON 2 project from Lars von Trier artisanal bath soap business Theodore Twombly is $39.95 stars Charlotte Gainsbourg recently engaged to a struggling writer intrigued by an advanced as Joe, a self-diagnosed Julia Louis-Dreyfus returns AKA Brooklyn yuppie – is sentenced to operating system that promises to be an nymphomaniac. After a to her role as Vice President fifteen months in a women’s federal prison intuitive entity in its own right, individual to beating in an alleyway, Joe is Selina Meyer for another for transporting a suitcase full of drug each user. As the system’s needs and desires taken in by an old, charming season of the hilarious money for her former girlfriend ten years grow in tandem with his own, their bachelor Seligman. As Joe recounts the story political comedy Veep. With earlier, she finds herself in an orange prison friendship deepens into love. Her is Jonze’s of her highly erotic life to Seligman, he the midterm elections jumpsuit amid an eccentric group of solo screenwriting debut and was awarded reflects on her words, connecting them with looming, Selina is scoring loveable inmates. Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars. his own knowledge of the world, and books.

THE ROVER The Two Faces of January Yves Saint Laurent David Michôd's highly anticipated follow-up to ANIMAL KINGDOM Hossein Amini writes and directs this stylish adaptation of Jalil Lespert’s look at the life of French designer Yves Saint is set in the Australian desert ten years following the collapse Patricia Highsmith's Europe-set thriller starring Viggo Mortensen, Laurent from his beginnings in the 1950’s. Featuring stunning of society and stars Guy Pearce as a hardened loner and Robert Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isacc. A Hitchcockian thriller of Paris scenery, this tribute to the modern history of French high Pattinson as a naive gang member left behind. uncommon sophistication, Oscar nominee Amini's feature fashion is also a moving story of enduring love. Release date: June 8 (MA15+) directorial debut makes him a filmmaker to watch. Release date: June 26 (CTC) Release date: June 19 (M)

Melbourne’s home of quality arthouse and contemporary cinema 380 Lygon Street Carlton cinemanova.com.au 22 READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014

New Music LAZARETTO Jack White Album of the Month $21.95 Pop & Rock Released 6 June LED ZEPPELIN I, II & III Led Zeppelin STAY GOLD Lazaretto inhabits an $19.95 each exciting place in Jack Released 6 June First Aid Kit White’s expansive $21.95 discography as the There are but a few unarguably important and revered Released 6 June follow-up to his 2012 solo groups in modern music that deserve the epithet ‘legendary’. release, Blunderbuss. Former member of If there is a canon of rock-and-roll, Led Zeppelin stand proudly as its Homer, its Milton In the follow-up to their the White Stripes and one of Rolling and its Rabelais: bare-chested founding fathers of heavy metal, epic blues–rock hugely successful 2012 Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, pioneers, occult ethno–folk explorers, vaulting demigods of virtuoso questing and release, The Lion’s Roar, White is a musician, singer-songwriter, grandiose excess. Led Zeppelin birthed a sound often imitated, never bettered: sisters Klara and Johanna record producer, multi-instrumentalist riff-laden, both delicate and crushingly heavy, sonically ambitious and played with Söderberg now present an and occasional actor who has a reputation unmatched skill. With the exception of the Beatles, their legacy is perhaps the most ambitious collection of songs that sees for creating daring musical projects. influential in contemporary music. them in full bloom as vivid storytellers. It’s been over 20 years since Jimmy Page revisited the master tapes of Led Drawing inspiration from sources as IDYLLWILD Zeppelin’s essential catalogue to give them a polish – back then it was for the 1990s varied as spaghetti western films and Lee Mia Dyson box set, which, while appeasing the audiophiles, offered little previously unreleased Hazlewood productions, Stay Gold $24.95 material: just four songs, in fact. Since then, every mainstay of rock history has been features their most sophisticated Released 6 June shaken down for rare, unheard tracks in a steady stream of deluxe editions and box songwriting and arrangements to date, Mia Dyson’s fifth album sets – Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Neil Young. But where was the Zep? Finally, after the introducing new elements to their Idyllwild – the follow-up stop-gap Mothership compilation of 2007 and the triumphant live reunion, Celebration traditionally pared-back music, including to her critically acclaimed Day, comes the reissue of the first (and arguably best) three albums from the mighty a 13-piece orchestra. 2012 album The Moment Led Zeppelin (the first is pictured here). – is yet another gem from A LETTER HOME one of Australia’s finest musicians. Though ‘Led Zeppelin birthed a sound often imitated, never bettered: riff-laden … Neil Young Dyson has adopted a new approach with $19.95 this release, moving away from the straight sonically ambitious and played with unmatched skill.’ blues of her earlier music to create a Released through Jack rockier sound, she retains her roots and the Each one is remastered and re-packaged with a welter of bonus material: White’s Third Man songs reflect her artistic development as a live tracks, out-takes, alternate versions and dozens of unseen photos. Available as a Records and recorded in a singer and songwriter. single or double-disc CD, or in a super-deluxe box set, each album is also available on refurbished Voice-O- 180-gram vinyl with exact replica covers. Of course, the songs we all know and love Graph recording booth, A STOCKHOLM sound remarkable when brought to today’s aural standards, but the bonus tracks are a Letter Home is, in Neil Young’s own words, Chrissie Hynde revelation, such as the early take of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ from Led Zeppelin II, which is a much tighter and leaner version. Hearing these songs in their raw, embryonic form is ‘an unheard collection of rediscovered songs $24.95 a breathtaking, exhilarating experience that captures a band finding its strengths, the from the past recorded on ancient electro- Chrissie Hynde was the members perhaps as yet unaware of their incredible power. mechanical technology’. The featured frontwoman of the covers all have personal meaning for Young, Pretenders, and her debut Tam Patton is from Readings Carlton such as British folk artist Bert Jansch’s solo album is a welcome ‘Needle of Death’, which inspired Young to addition to her catalogue. write ‘Needle and the Damage Done’. Recorded with Björn Yttling who produced, and include contributions from a select DC’s Blues Alley during stands with two co-wrote and played guitar on the record, handful of talented musicians – Darrell different trios: Redman, drummer Gregory ACID RAIN AND Stockholm has been described by Hynde as Scott, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Ashley Hutchinson and bassist Matt Penman at SUGAR CANE ‘Abba meets John Lennon’ and features Cleveland, the McCrary Sisters, and more. Jazz Standard; Redman, Hutchinson and Wagons contributions from Neil Young, John bassist Reuben Rogers at Blues Alley. $21.95 McEnroe and Joakim Åhlund. Blues Acid Rain and Sugar Cane ZABA World transports the listener Glass Animals I LIVE IN MY HEAD A LOT through the many dusty $24.95 THESE DAYS ZOOM and haunted halls Jeff Lang Rachid Taha country rock outfit South London electronic $21.95 $29.95 Wagons has stomped through over the R&B quartet Glass Animals Rachid Taha, born in past decade. Co-produced by Mick Blending rock, roots, folk, are a band shrouded in Algeria but who Harvey (who also contributes keys, guitar blues, ballads, mystery. Their debut spent his formative years and percussion to the overall sound), this instrumentals, album ZABA is wholly in France, has made a album mixes potent rock-and-roll improvisation and a immersive and best listened to in a single string of very good albums attitude with intellect and refinement. devastatingly high level of sitting, from start to end. Inspired by tales combining North African sounds with Stinging electric guitars coalesce with musicality, Australian-based musician Jeff of adventure from frontman Dave Bayley’s Western-style rock. His last album from horns, strings and backing vocals for a Lang has earned himself a deserving youth, including Heart of Darkness and The 2009, Bonjour, was a very laid back and thrilling, turbulent ride. reputation as a virtuosic guitarist and Island of Doctor Moreau, the songs present dynamic songwriter; his performances are disappointing affair, but Taha is back on a wealth of strange characters and the WHISPERS legendary. In I Live in My Head a Lot These track with Zoom. The album was produced weird, subtropical land in which they exist. Days he presents songs as though they were by Justin Adams, a guitarist for Robert Passenger novellas, rich with depth and vision, and Plant and a highly talented player who $21.95. Deluxe 2CD edition $24.95 open for individual interpretation. specialises in a raucous mix of blues, North Country African and rock music. Taha formed his Whispers is Passenger’s first band in 1982 after being inspired by (AKA Mike Rosenberg) TROUBLE & LOVE Jazz the punk sounds coming out of the UK, sixth studio album and the Mary Gauthier especially by his heroes The Clash. Mick follow-up to the critically $24.95 Jones, of The Clash, is a guest here with acclaimed, All the Little TRIOS LIVE Released 13 June vocals and guitar, and some of the songs do Lights. Despite its sumptuous symphonic Joshua Redman have that heavy guitar riffing reminiscent sound, no big budgets were blown in its $24.95 of the Sex Pistols. Elsewhere, Arabic strings Mary Gauthier is production and what you will discover in Released 13 June sit very comfortably alongside rock-and- determined to break your this album are stories – some real, some This exceptional new roll guitars. There’s a fun remake of Elvis heart with Trouble & Love. imagined – of love, death, growing up and album from American jazz Presley’s ‘It’s Now or Never’ and the odd Anyone who has loved and getting old. Fan favourite, ‘Scare Away the saxophonist Joshua sample from the great singer, Umm lost can’t fail to be moved Dark’, is also included in the tracklist, a Redman features four Kulthum. This is a real rocking collection, by this devastatingly beautiful record, riotous rant about technology taking over original tunes by Redman, and makes for a very enjoyable listen for described by Gauthier as a ‘transformation our lives that proves Passenger can be as as well as interpretations of three those open to something different. laugh-out-loud funny on record as he is album’, which rose from a particularly dark additional songs. It was recorded at New Paul Barr is from Readings Carlton telling tales on stage. period in her life. The songs are intimate York City’s Jazz Standard and Washington READINGS MONTHLY JUNE 2014 23

New Classical Music A THOUSAND THOUGHTS Wipe Away All the Tears’ in a newly Kronos Quartet arranged intimate sound. Even though these recordings are not new, this CD Nonesuch. 7559795573. $26.95 Classical Album of the Month benefits enormously from the magnificent In honour of their 40 years singing of the choral group Polyphony. together as a group, the MOSAIC: AUSTRALIAN GUITAR Kronos Quartet have NEEME JÄRVI CONCERTOS released this partial CONDUCTS MASSENET Karin Schaupp compilation album (10 of Neeme Järvi & Orchestre ABC Classics. 4810961. $24.95 the album’s 15 pieces are previously unreleased). David Harrington, John Sherba de la Suisse Romande Karin Schaupp’s albums are like a breath of fresh air in the (violins), Hank Dutt (viola) and Sunny Yang Chandos. CHSA5137. $29.95 world of big, heavy classical music. No Beethoven or Brahms (cello) have each pursued a singular artistic This collection of for her, rather the floral world of Peter Sculthorpe and Ross Edwards. She starts with vision, combining a spirit of exploration overtures, ballet music ‘Mosaic’, the single movement concerto by Richard Charlton, a fellow Australian with a commitment to continually re- and concert pieces, each guitarist. It’s a delightful work that really should get more airplay. This is followed by imagining the string quartet experience. with its own unique Edwards’ Guitar Concerto in three movements. If you’ve heard Edwards’ works before They have long been known as interpreters orchestral colour, then you know his style of ‘dance/chants’ that permeate this work – a must for any fans of music from around the world, expanding showcases Massenet’s orchestral writing of his music. The middle work is by another Australian composer, the lesser-known the string quartet repertoire with works at its finest. From the opening diminished Philip Bracanin. Bracanin draws heavily on the Baroque and Classical eras for his from across genres. In the process, Kronos seventh chord of the concert work harmonic forms, creating a work that shows the beauty of Schaupp’s playing. has become one of the most celebrated and ‘Ouverture de Phèdre’ it is clear that we Counteracting the Neo-Classical style are often-angular melodic lines that bounce influential groups of our time. A Thousand are in a world of high drama. In complete from soloist to orchestra in a seamless interplay between the different timbres of the Thoughts is a look at Kronos’s contrast is the ‘Scènes pittoresques’, full of orchestra. Finally, Schaupp finishes with the eerie and evocative ‘Nourlangie’ by geographically wide-ranging sources. It a grace and elegance that is often Sculthorpe. The piece is named after a rock formation found deep in the heart of features music from 14 countries, including reminiscent of Tchaikovsky. The ‘Suite de Kakadu National Park, where for over 20,000 years the Gundjeihmi speakers lived China, India, Sweden, and Vietnam. ballet’, from Le Cid, evokes yet another during the wet season. To this day, the true meaning of the plentiful rock art, full of sound world, one of exotic colours and myth and legend, is known only to a few Aboriginal people. This is all communicated exuberant celebration, its seven through Sculthorpe’s powerful work, which feels just beyond our reach of MUSIC TO DRIVE AWAY movements featuring dance music from understanding. Three of the four composers on Schaupp’s new album take their LOITERERS different regions of Spain. Also featured inspiration from the Northern Territory, particularly Arnhem Land, and though I have Gil Shaham on this disc are a number of works never been there myself, I find that this music can transport you to a world of bright Canary Classics. CC13. $29.95 involving a solo cello, performed here by sunlight, wide landscapes and a riot of colours. This album will show you a bewitching What does it say about our Truls Mørk. He shines a light on world of music that should not be missed. society today when fine Massenet’s little-known ‘Fantaisie’ for Kate Rockstrom is a friend of Readings music is being used as a cello and orchestra, a fine piece rarely deterrent? Train and The first 50 customers to buy a copy of Mosaic from our Carlton or online shop will heard on disc or in the concert hall. subway station managers receive a $30 voucher for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra the world over, shopkeepers big and small, DISTANT LIGHT: BACH, are all turning to classical music to keep VASKS – VIOLIN IN THE NIGHT JOHN ADAMS: CITY NOIR loiterers at bay. From the Metro in Paris, to Stephen Hough David Robertson & McDonald’s in Sydney, downtown YMCA CONCERTOS Hyperion. CDA67996. $29.95 St Louis Symphony in Columbus and major train and metro Renaud Capuçon & Chamber Orchestra of Europe This latest recital album Nonesuch. 7559795644. $24.95 stations all across the US – all have, in from ‘the thinking person’s Released 6 June recent years, resorted to classical music to Erato. 2564630864. $19.95 ‘restore order’, with classical favourites virtuoso: an extraordinary City Noir ‘is a symphony In Renaud Capuçon’s first being deployed as a ‘social deterrent’ to pianist’, named such by inspired by the peculiar recording as both soloist keep intimidating, unsavoury types away. the New York Times, takes ambience and mood of Los and conductor – also his All this has resulted in a revelation for the listener on a journey through that most Angeles “noir” films, first recording with the violinist Gil Shaham: ‘As a violinist intense and absorbing of nineteenth- especially those produced Chamber Orchestra of dedicated to my art, I have always looked century obsessions: the night. The in the late 1940s and early 50s,’ says Adams Europe – he juxtaposes Bach’s violin to help the Greater Good. When I heard Romantic night was one without sleep, in his notes on the piece. ‘My music is an concertos in A minor and E major with a that classical music is used as a tool to where experiences were mutated through homage not necessarily to the film music of haunting concerto written more than 350 drive away loiterers, I thought I’d found darkness. Stephen Hough begins with that period but rather to the overall aesthetic years later: ‘Tala gaisma’ (‘Distant Light’) my niche.’ Schumann’s troubled, reeling ‘In der Nacht’ of the era. City Noir is the third work in a by contemporary Latvian composer from Fantasiestücke, and continues with triptych of orchestral works that have as Peteris Vasks. This program is as Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata and Chopin’s their theme the California experience, its KARL JENKINS: MOTETS intriguing as it is unexpected. Capuçon two Op. 27 Nocturnes. With Schumann’s landscape and its culture.’ Adams’ Polyphony & Stephen Layton – who points out that the Bach A minor ‘Carnaval’, the final work on this recording, Saxophone Concerto was composed for DG. 4793232. $24.95 was the first concerto he ever played – had we eavesdrop on one of the most vibrant Timothy McAllister, whom the composer Motets is an intimate, a considered the more conventional parties in the nineteenth-century piano described as ‘a fearless musician and risk cappella album that complement of Bach’s Double Violin literature, with its panoply of brilliantly taker’ after the musician’s performance of features stunning new Concerto; but he settled on ‘Distant Light’, etched character sketches depicting both what Adams calls a ‘fiendishly difficult’ alto choral adaptions of a work which, as he says, ‘I fell in love real people – such as Chopin and Paganini sax solo part in City Noir. The Australian Jenkins’ previous with as soon as I discovered it.’ He decided – and imaginary ones. Stephen Hough’s noted of its world premiere performance compositions and marks the year of his to ‘put together two different worlds, thoughtful programming creates a new that ‘in the relentless, bebop-like figurations seventieth birthday and 50 years of his Bach’s and Vasks’ ... Their music does, aural sphere for some of the most – stunningly executed – it recalled the career in music. The album goes back in however, share a purity ... it rises up from celebrated piano works in the repertoire. frenetic solos of Charlie Parker, Cannonball time and celebrates his hits from the past, a source. When you play it, you don’t get Also included is Hough’s own Piano Sonata Adderley and John Coltrane’. This is the including the Benedictus from The Armed tired … It is healing music, feeding you No. 2, ‘notturno luminoso’. first recording of the work. Man as well as the stunning ‘God Shall and giving you energy.’

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