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Jezz Day Out - MPAC

Fiction

Eight Lives by Susan Hurley

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June–July 2019, no. 412
Stephen Dedman reviews 'Eight Lives' by Susan Hurley
Eight Lives is a meticulously crafted first novel by Susan Hurley, a 2017 Peter Carey Short Story Award nominee and a medical researcher with more than thirty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s an intricate thriller told in a multiple first-person style by friends, family, and associates of the late Dr David Tran, all of whom feel some responsibility for his horrific death ... ... (read more)

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

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June–July 2019, no. 412
Lisa Bennett reviews 'Exhalation' by Ted Chiang
Mainstream science fiction is a genre that thrives on quantity as much as quality. Such narratives pose the deepest questions; as Douglas Adams once famously put it, these are stories about Life, the Universe, and Everything. Why publish stand-alone space operas when storylines, character arcs, worlds, and revenues can be elaborated across trilogies? ... (read more)

Typhoon Kingdom by Matthew Hooton

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June–July 2019, no. 412
Alison Broinowski reviews 'Typhoon Kingdom' by Matthew Hooton
In the May 2019 issue of Quadrant, its literary editor, Barry Spurr, inveighed against the ‘inane expansion of creative writing courses’. Professor Spurr’s scholarly accomplishments in the study of poetry and Australian fiction do not include creative writing. (His resignation from the University of Sydney was accepted in December 2014 ... ... (read more)

Spring by Ali Smith

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June–July 2019, no. 412
Jack Callil reviews 'Spring' by Ali Smith
Uncertainty is the new norm. Nationalist rhetoric is rife. Donald Trump is running for the US presidency. It’s June 2016 and the Brexit referendum has dazed the international community, heralding the start of the United Kingdom’s glacial extraction from the European Union. Amid the turmoil, Irish novelist Ali Smith releases Autumn ... ... (read more)

'This is the way the world ends' by Beejay Silcox

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May 2019, no. 411
'This is the way the world ends' by Beejay Silcox

When truth is stranger than fiction, fiction is a potent source of truth. In the first week of the Trump administration, sales of 1984 increased by 9,500 per cent, catapulting George Orwell’s sexagenarian novel to the top of global bestseller charts. As Kellyanne Conway recast White House lies as ‘alternative facts’ ...

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The Shining Wall by Melissa Ferguson

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May 2019, no. 411
Jacinta Mulders reviews 'The Shining Wall' by Melissa Ferguson

In Melissa Ferguson’s impressive sci-fi début, wealthy, tech-enhanced Homo sapiens cordon themselves off behind a shining wall. In the desert outside their City (‘City 1’), ‘Demi-Citizens’ live in slum conditions, riddled with disease, hunger, and mistrust ...

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Driving Into the Sun by Marcella Polain

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May 2019, no. 411
Stephen Dedman reviews 'Driving Into the Sun' by Marcella Polain

In Driving Into the Sun, Marcella Polain – winner of the Anne Elder Award, the Patricia Hackett Prize, and more – has done an excellent job of capturing the inner emotional landscape of a young girl growing up fatherless in Perth’s outer suburbia in the 1960s ...

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Gravity Is The Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty

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May 2019, no. 411
Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'Gravity Is The Thing' by Jaclyn Moriarty

The first thing one notices about Jaclyn Moriarty’s Gravity Is the Thing is its narrative voice: distinctive, almost stylised. Exclamation marks, emphasised words in italics, a staccato rhythm, and clever comments in parentheses add up to a writing style sometimes deemed quirky ...

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Into the Fire by Sonia Orchard

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May 2019, no. 411
Keyvan Allahyari reviews 'Into the Fire' by Sonia Orchard

The American writer bell hooks had characterised the 1990s as a period of ‘collusion’ between well-educated white women and the capitalist patriarchy (Where We Stand: Class matters, 2000). The new workplace gave these women greater economic power but curbed their ...

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Room for a Stranger by Melanie Cheng

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May 2019, no. 411
Alice Nelson reviews 'Room for a Stranger' by Melanie Cheng

What does it mean to live in a place but never to fully belong to it? How does our capacity for intimacy alter when we are in exile? How do we forge an identity among haphazard collisions of cultures and histories? These are the questions that Melanie Cheng ...

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