Shannon Burns

Shannon Burns reviews 'A History of Masculinity: From patriarchy to gender justice' by Ivan Jablonka, translated by Nathan Bracher

July 2022, no. 444 • 25 June 2022

A History of Masculinity begins with the observation that we live in a global patriarchy that restricts the rights and freedoms of women, and that remedying this situation is a matter of urgent concern. To that end, ‘we need egalitarian men who care more about respect than power’. Ivan Jablonka acknowledges the accusation that men who are active in the feminist movement simply amplify sexist d ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Young Mungo' by Douglas Stuart

June 2022, no. 443 • 23 May 2022

Like the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain (2020), Douglas Stuart’s second novel is set in the post-Thatcher, post-industrial, working-class Glasgow housing schemes dominated by unemployment and dysfunctional families. Both novels are populated with alcoholic mothers and violent or absent fathers whose neglected children are forever vulnerable to abuse and hardship. Their titular protagonists must fit ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Scary Monsters' by Michelle de Kretser

October 2021, no. 436 • 23 September 2021

To read Michelle de Kretser’s fiction is to sense important details swimming under the surface of our awareness, forming patterns that will come into view by the end of the story, or after contemplating it for a time, or while rereading. There is always enough to satisfy our immediate needs – rich aphorisms, sharp characterisation, satirical wickedness, the play of language, political and hist ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Other Half of You' by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

August 2021, no. 434 • 22 July 2021

Bani Adam returns as the narrator–protagonist of Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You, a sequel to his two previous books. The most recent one, The Lebs (2018), gave us the story of Bani’s teenage years at Punchbowl Boys’ High School: the trials of a Lebanese Muslim boy in a majority Lebanese Muslim community nestled inside the larger, diverse territories of Western Sydney, in po ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'O' by Steven Carroll

April 2021, no. 430 • 23 March 2021

On the back cover of O, we learn that the protagonist of the novel, Dominique, lived through the German occupation of France, participated in the Resistance, relished its ‘clandestine life’, and later wrote an ‘erotic novel about surrender, submission and shame’, which became the real-life international bestseller and French national scandal, Histoire d’O (1954). ‘But what is the story ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'On Getting Off: Sex and philosophy' by Damon Young

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 17 December 2020

On Getting Off is an attempt to think about sex philosophically, through the lens of personal, literary, and artistic experience. Damon Young, a Melbourne philosopher, is keen on reflective sex and legitimises this fetish with a carrot and stick, seducing readers by arguing for its superior pleasures and threatening us by implying that the alternatives are morally dubious or diminishing. He consid ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Essays One' by Lydia Davis

April 2020, no. 420 • 20 March 2020

Essays One is the first of two volumes of collected non-fiction drawn from all periods of Lydia Davis’s long career. While the second collection will, according to the author, ‘concentrate more single-mindedly on translation and the experience of reading foreign languages’, this volume has an alternating focus on writing and reading practices, translation, commentary, reviews, and personal e ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Ducks, Newburyport' by Lucy Ellmann

December 2019, no. 417 • 25 October 2019

Lucy Ellmann’s ambitious seventh novel stages the workings of a mind as it digests – or fails to digest – life-altering experiences. Ducks, Newburyport is, for the most part, the ruminating inner monologue of a bewildered and frightened woman. It spans a thousand mostly artful pages and is an undeniably impressive accomplishment. However, for readers who relished Ellmann’s brilliant comic ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Rapids: Ways of looking at mania' by Sam Twyford-Moore

August 2018, no. 403 • 26 July 2018

In The Rapids: Ways of looking at mania, Sam Twyford-Moore takes a personal, exploratory, and speculative approach to the subject of mania. Because the author has been significantly governed by manic episodes on several occasions (he was diagnosed with manic depression as he ‘came into adulthood’), The Rapids offers an insider’s perspective. It also considers some of the public and cultural ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Relatively Famous' by Roger Averill

May 2018, no. 401 • 26 April 2018

In Relatively Famous, Roger Averill combines a fictional memoir with extracts from a faux-biography of the memoirist’s Booker Prize-winning father, Gilbert Madigan. The biography amounts to a fairly bloodless summary of the events of Madigan’s life, and his son’s memoir is similarly sedate. This makes for a limp but sensitively conceived novel about paternal failure and the extent to which p ... (read more)