Collected Works benefit

Collected Works, under the proprietorship of Kris Hemensley, is one of the treasures of Melbourne. It is that rarest of businesses, a poetry...

Overland, MWF and stuff

I hope you've all ordered your copy of the 200th issue of Overland, due to be launched in a shower of bubbly at the Melbourne Writers Fe...

Drama as literature

Having spent today addressing an empty screen in the increasingly vain hope that the god of critics will bestow some benediction, or at leas...

Off the shelf

ABC Radio National's Book Show grabbed me during the Melbourne Writers Festival and, as we stood huddled from the wind in a corner of Fe...

Monday morning rantaround

The Public Intellectual (PI, for the acronymic among you) debate continues with a Guardian blog post by Andrew Haydon, in which he robustly ...

Oh no!

Update: some early industry responses on the Ragged Claws blog.The Productivity Commission today released its long awaited report on the par...

This Author business

It's Sunday, enough excuse to be bloggishly personal... Ms TN's week as an Author has left me feeling a little (as Bilbo said to Gan...

On Ecstasy

Those who have followed Barrie Kosky's theatre over the past two decades should already know that the man is a rampant sensualist. This ...

The Great Wall of Books

Generalising... we could infer that all forms have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural "content". This would con...

Playwright as social symptom

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post responding to an article about Hilary Glow's new book, Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Pub...

Ursula Le Guin

A little belatedly - Radio National's The Book Show broadcast my review of Ursula Le Guin's Voices last week. As I say of Ms Le Guin...

The issue of "issues"

A bonus for all you happy readers: Victoria Chance from Currency Press has a special offer to TN readers: if you order Power Plays online be...

Iain Sinclair on London

Six months after this beautiful book found its way into my lustful hands (my fault entirely, I fear; it took me a long time to read it), my ...

Cross-Racial Casting: or The Social Pages

Last night, Lee Lewis' Platform Paper on Cross-Racial Casting was launched at the Beckett Theatre with vim, espièglerie and lashings of ...

World Croggon Redux

World Croggon is a little ott at the moment (for those not hip to the cyber-acronyms, it means over the top). While some of my beetle-browed...

Brief fantasia

Those who think it's been a bit quiet here might recall that I temporarily blew up last week, driving a deep hole in my novel schedule. ...

On Dante

My review of Barbara Reynolds' Dante: The Poet, The Political Thinker, The Man was broadcast on ABC Radio National's The Book Show t...

Review: Simple Gifts

My review of George Ogilvie's autobiography Simple Gifts, published by Currency House, was broadcast today on ABC Radio National's T...

Briefly off topic

My review of JG Ballard's new novel, Kingdom Come, was broadcast today on ABC Radio National's The Book Show. Transcript and audio h...

Contemporary Australian Drama

Reviewed for The Book Show, ABC Radio National - you can listen to me here or read on...Contemporary Australian Drama by Leonard Radic. Bran...