Peter Rose
Peter Rose is the Editor and CEO of Australian Book Review. His books include a family memoir, Rose Boys (2001), which won the National Biography Award in 2003. He has published two novels and six poetry collections, most recently The Subject of Feeling (UWA Publishing, 2015).
Hot off the press – possibly the longest of recorded literary longlists, for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award, which is worth $50,000 – not quite prime ministerial, but still premiership material, and well worth winning, apart from the kudos attached to Australia’s pre-eminent literary competition.
Of the sixty-one novels entered in the Award, the judges have longlisted thirteen. ... (read more)
To Her Majesty’s for the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Pinter’s sixth play, it opened in April 1960 and ran forever (444 performances), his first commercial success, though by no means his first critical one (Harold Hobson had famously extolled the short-lived Birthday Party two years earlier.)
The gently raked stage, littered with junk and de ... (read more)
To Adelaide for the last day of Writers’ Week, now an annual affair (ambitiously, some think) under the guidance of Laura Kroetsch (Director). Ms Kroetsch, an American, joins Adelaide from Wellington, where she ran the literary festival for many years. The removal of long-time director Rose Wight created some heat in certain quarters, but I didn’t share the forebodings about what Ms Kroetsch m ... (read more)
One of the things we try to do at ABR is to note each month a sample, however small, of some of the best publishing from overseas – especially works that are unlikely to be reviewed extensively, or at all, in this country (beyond the learned journals, if they bother with them). Many significant titles that pop up in TLS, Harper’s, LRB and NYRB go unreviewed in Australia – largely because sto ... (read more)
From time to time I’m asked what I look for in our reviewers – apart from wit, fleetness, and excellent grammar, that is. Well might a prospective reviewer ask, because the craft of reviewing is not one that is often discussed, or taught, or analysed. You’re on your own: a one-person, low-income cottage industry, a hostage to your telephone and computer, as I have written elsewhere.
... (read more)
by Peter Rose
January 6
Such high standards the American magazines maintain, with their enviable resources. Fine valedictory article in the New Yorker by Joyce Carol Oates on the death of her husband of four decades. Slightly uneasy, though, to realise that Oates, in her forensic way, was gathering data for such an article while he was failing.
But the magazines can still terrify. Harper’s In ... (read more)
Late afternoon. Another forty degree day. Sick of ecological talk I decide to meet it, take my book into the park, not sure how far I’ll go with Against Nature. Rare grass crackles beneath my feet. This is not turf but a shell oval, yet die-hards play in their filthy whites. Only clouds billow, lyric. Dog after dog sniffs my rug, preferring the plastic hats ringing the oval – odoriferous bo ... (read more)
So Patrick White’s most flamboyant novel (with the possible exception of The Twyborn Affair) has been brought to the cinema, after the usual longueurs and fiscal frights. Director Fred Schepisi and his scriptwriter, Judy Morris, have tamed the long and somewhat unwieldy beast that won White the Nobel Prize in 1973. Lovers of the novel will miss certain scenes, but there is a coherence to the scr ... (read more)
In her short memoir of Susan Sontag, novelist Sigrid Nunez claims that she did not read the obituaries and commentaries after her death in 2004, and that she was never much interested in what other people said about Sontag. If it’s true, she is indeed a rara avis. Susan Sontag, in death as in life, generates enormous interest and a growing literature, one that promises to burgeon and diversify b ... (read more)