Don Anderson

Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose, largely of texts from the Americas, Australia, and Europe. For fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular literary columnist in the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was for thirty years a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, where he taught American, Irish, and Australian literature, and literary theory. He was for some years a member of the Advisory Panel of ABR.

Don Anderson reviews 'The Street Sweeper' by Elliot Perlman

October 2011, no. 335 • 27 September 2011

In 2003, the year in which Elliot Perlman’s previous novel Seven Types of Ambiguity was published, the eminent gadfly David Marr suggested that Australian novelists failed to address major contemporary social concerns. As if anticipating Marr’s criticisms, Perlman wove a plot that involved stock market speculation (and peculation), upmarket Melbourne brothels, privatised prisons, privately man ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'The Chase' by Christopher Kremmer

September 2011, no. 334 • 23 August 2011

Australians are suckers for a day at the races, and may be suckers for novels and poems about a day at the races. Consider Gerald Murnane’s metaphysics of racing, Peter Temple’s grim Melbourne in which stresses are relieved by a bottle of Bolly or some such beverage after a successful day at the track. The term ‘Turf’ is granted three-and-a-half columns in the 1985 edition of the Oxford Co ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'The Simple Death' by Michael Duffy

March 2011, no. 329 • 14 April 2011

Michael Duffy, perhaps best known as a newspaper columnist and contrarian, and co-presenter with Paul Comrie-Thomson of ABC Radio National’s conservative corrective Counterpoint, has also been an editor, notably of the Independent Monthly (1993–96), and a publisher. In 1996 he set up his own company, Duffy & Snellgrove, which mainly produced serious non-fiction books, but also John Birming ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'The Finkler Question' by Howard Jacobson

December 2010–January 2011, no. 327 • 07 December 2010

The Finkler Question (ðəfiŋkl kwest∫ən) n. (after Samuel Ezra [‘Sam’] Finkler). Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew … If this was what all Jews looked like, Treslove thought, then Finkler, which sounded like Sprinkler, was a better name for them than Jews. So that was what he called them privately – Finklers … Finkler opened wide his arms Finklerishly … It was ... (read more)