Still Life With Cat

Here's a thing I've just noticed about this week's copy for the column of short book reviews I'm currently writing for the ...

The brevity that is the soul of Twitter is not, I feel, entirely my thing. It's enough of a struggle writing four short fiction review...

What are the odds of reading two new novels in 24 hours that both reference this painting, I wonder. But having done so, I felt compelled t...

I hate crying. Not only am I one of those people unable to cry prettily (red-eyed, blotchy etc) but it doesn't even help, as it is popul...

One of the many lovely things about reading fiction for a living is that it tends to make you an armchair (time-)traveller. Just in the last...

Loth to let the litblog thing go altogether, though one has tried and failed to keep it up at more than one site, one is having yet another ...

(1) If you're trying to think through/develop/write a complicated argument about Aboriginal writing and its relationship to ideas about ...

The Weatherpixie in the sidebar there, at this moment anyway, is telling me that at Adelaide Airport, 20 minutes south of here, there is cur...

There are four kinds of book review. There's the good good review , which is both favourable about its subject and skilfully, knowledgea...

She was wondering whether it would be nosy to ask Miss Foot why she was on the ship when her companion said, 'I am travelling to New Yor...

Assistance is sought from the gentle reader (and all the others, whoever you may be) on a project I dreamed up twenty minutes ago that has a...

I sit on the sofa and I read one novel after another: good novels with bad bits, bad novels with good bits, good novels in whose subject mat...

On page 263 of John Grisham's new novel The Associate , which in most respects I'm enjoying for all the usual Grisham things, there ...

Alexander McCall Smith, who as I write this is just across town in the lovely old Capri Cinema charming the pants off a no doubt full house,...

This is a post for Stephanie , scholar and medievalist extraordinaire, who probably knows these pictures. Last week I read a horror novel by...

The blurb says this person has already published six books so you are expecting a degree of professionalism, a sign that here is someone who...

In the wake of the Windschuttle hoax there's been a lot of discussion around the online traps, in the course of which I observed as par...

Over at Pea Soup, Suse has a lovely holiday post including a snap of her summer reading, Nadia Wheatley's superb biography of Charmian ...

As almost everyone who comes here knows for themselves already, a life spent reading fiction produces a swag of paragraphs that are not exac...

Call me unimaginative but I would not have predicted that a 'novel' by 'Belle de Jour', author of The Intimate Adventures of...