Essays
Kate Jennings: Trouble: Selected Writings 1970-2010
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009The cover for Kate Jennings’s new book, Trouble: Selected Writings 1970-2010, which is to be published by Black Inc. in 2010. In 1970 Kate Jennings, 21, stunned a Sydney anti-war rally with a pull-no-punches speech that put “women’s lib” on the map. Brave, impassioned and searingly sarcastic, the speech set the tone for the idiosyncratic [...]
The Bologna Book Fair revisited
Friday, April 24th, 2009By CATHERINE JINKS | The Bologna Book Fair isn’t about writing. It’s about product – or ‘content’, as they say in the movie business. Writers don’t really belong at the fair; in fact there seems to be a genuine concern in some quarters that the vast array of ‘product’ will depress and discourage even the [...]
Kate Jennings: American Revolution
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008Where were you when America elected Barack Obama? Kate Jennings was in New York, eyes wide open, completing her take on an amazing time: “the run-up to the election … a time when every day felt like a year and we became slightly crazed from worry but also mesmerised, unable to switch off the cable [...]
Kate Jennings: To Hell with the Future
Friday, October 3rd, 2008Kate Jennings’s prophetic essay To Hell with the Future was published in the Australian Financial Review back in April, and is to be included in Black Inc’s Best Australian Essays 2008 By Kate Jennings | illustrations by Rohan Cain | Because I wrote a novel, Moral Hazard, and opinion pieces for The New York Times [...]
Marshall Browne: Evolution of a character
Monday, September 15th, 2008Marshall Browne’s first Franz Schmidt novel, The Eye of the Abyss, is to be re-issued by Random House Australia in January, with the sequel, The Iron Heart, to be published in March. Here he writes about the creation of Auditor Franz Schmidt: Several years ago an image of three figures walking in a foggy street [...]
Essay: True North
Thursday, September 27th, 2007BY SUSAN JOHNSON | I was born fifty years ago in the Australian north, in Brisbane, around the same time a young David Malouf was setting off for London. It sometimes seems to me that the idea of north has exerted its pull on me ever since I can remember. Although I was born in [...]
Essay: A La Recherche
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007BY NICOLAS ROTHWELL | A strange, despairing pleasure comes over us at the moment when we close, for the last time in this life, a great masterpiece that has lived with us and shaped our thoughts from adolescence into adulthood. This pleasure has a taut, bold energy, like all forms of renunciation: it is full [...]
Essay: Butterflies
Sunday, June 24th, 2007BY NICOLAS ROTHWELL | The happiest days of my childhood were spent in a resort of the Swiss Graubunden, where each afternoon the great political cartoonist Vicky, who was later to take his life, would draw for me a paper bestiary of dragons and winged monsters so fierce and fire-breathing they would guarantee whoever saw [...]
Essay: On Writing
Thursday, April 12th, 2007BY NICOLAS ROTHWELL | Pale autumn sunlight drifting through the trees, a murmur from the wavelets lapping at the shore, the call of a far-off kookaburra, the fitful moaning of a crested dove — how could one not be productive, set in such surrounds? And where could be more calming, more conducive to the writer’s [...]
