Michelle Griffin

On Valentine’s Day, the State Library of Victoria will host its third literary speed-dating dinner, an event that makes explicit something that has long been implicit in contemporary courtship chatter: you can judge a lover by their book. Participants in these events have about three minutes to impress each potential partner with the one book they brought along for show-and-tell. At the first su ... (read more)

Is Robert Adamson Waving to Hart Crane, or drowning? He is certainly calling for help. In 1930, Hart Crane turned his back on Eliot’s The Waste Land and built The Bridge, a poem ‘to launch into praise’, to span across despair towards some brighter shore. But Adamson does not like what he finds on the other side, ‘No sonnet will survive / the fax on fire’, he warns. The Clean Dark, the 1 ... (read more)

A smattering of cultural theory is helpful when reading Gail Jones. The academic bones of her writing always show through the thin padding of her concept-driven stories: deconstructed photography in Sixty Lights (2005), technology and intimacy entwined in Dreams of Speaking (2006). It is more than disconcerting when the narrator of Jones’s third novel, Sorry, starts to interrogate the text with ... (read more)

The Vogel Prize shares a reputation with the rest of the company’s products: nutritious, worthy, a little dull. But the prize’s earnest image is unfair. Any glance at the roll-call of winners over the last twenty-five years would show that the makers of soggy bread and soya cereals have done more than anyone to introduce fresh literary DNA into Australia’s tiny gene pool of published novelis ... (read more)