Featured in
- Published 20250506
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-07-4
- Extent: 196 pp
- Paperback, ebook, PDF

Already a subscriber? Sign in here
If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au
Share article
More from author
Tokyo driftless
I attempt to read a Murakami book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I have only read Norwegian Wood because people who are into Murakami tend to be annoying. The book is about an unemployed househusband to whom strange things happen. I stop reading it. Since moving to Japan with my husband for his job, I have mostly read Australian fiction and Dickens. The most celebrated Japanese novels available in English tend to be about alienated people with mental health issues.
More from this edition
The art of appropriation
In Conversation When Brandi Salmon taught herself to paint as a teenager in country Victoria, she never imagined she’d grow up to be a full-time visual...
Trip Advisor review of a protest
Poetry Firstly, what’s with all the footwork? A downward slope would be an attribute. There’s enough gory fundamentalism without toe jam. On that note, can...
A half-century of hatchet jobs
Non-fictionAuthors and publishers worry that bad reviews kill sales. I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case, but plenty that bad reviews distress and demoralise their subjects. Many people who care about literature endow criticism, and especially negative reviews, with magical powers. They hold dear the fantasy that if critics did a better job, if they were braver soldiers, the profound structural problems that bedevil Australian literature – books rushed to press, low pay, policy indifference, plummeting reading rates, crisis in higher education, not to mention the racism and the classism – might somehow disappear. A cracking review ennobles its subject with attention and consideration, but I’ve never seen one earn an author a higher advance on their next book or buy them more time for revision, let alone shift the federal arts budget.