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About the author

Isabella G Mead

Isabella G Mead’s debut poetry collection, The Infant Vine, was published in 2024 by UWAP. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Island, Rabbit, Westerly,...

More from this edition

Non-fictionIt’s safe to say, then, that Star’s protagonist is not a carbon copy of Mishima, despite the novelist’s status as Japan’s first Sūpāsutā (superstar). Twenty-three and blindingly gorgeous, Rikio Mizuno, known by the anglicised monomer Richie, is a Japanese James Dean. ‘I am a speeding car that never stops,’ Richie muses, conflating the icon with the instrument of his death. ‘I’m huge, shiny and new, coming from the other side of midnight… I ride and ride and never arrive.’ Unlike Dean, Richie survives past his twenty-fourth birthday, the addition of a single year weighing on him like a death sentence. At the story’s conclusion, when Richie is confronted by the crinkled visage of a matinee idol of yesteryear, he realises that having celebrated the twenty-fourth birthday Dean was denied by his Porsche 550 Spyder, ‘Little Bastard’, he has missed his chance to, as Dean said, ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.’ Anyone who has been to a gay guy’s thirtieth birthday party will recognise the sentiment.

The marketing is still crap

Non-fictionToday’s onslaught of available content (not just in books and writing) and the concurrent impossibility of wading through it all to select the new or the significant or the simple exploding pleasure of language (remember that?) is likely part of where the current malaise began, and not just for me. So much is on trend these days, with great swathes of the population all reading the same book simultaneously, and so much of this is generated by the star-making machinery of billion-dollar multinational publishing houses with gigantic marketing budgets.

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...