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Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category

In Ecstasy is Perth author Kate McCaffrey’s second novel for teenagers. It was released in April of this year by Fremantle Press, and should be widely available in W.A. and elsewhere. McCaffrey is a high school English teacher like myself (and a lot of other writers, apparently) and her novel seems directed toward students in [...]

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Hemingway is one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century and yet it seems to me that his books are no longer as widely available as they once were. He has fallen out of fashion in a way that Joyce apparently never will. And yet his presence in the history of literature is [...]

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Well, my reading has ground to a halt. It was bound to happen after reading so many books in the first half of the year, but now I’m spending my free time playing old computer games instead. Despite this, I got out a few books from UWA yesterday. They are:
The Albanian - Donna Mazza - [...]

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Well, this tends to happen quite a bit. I start reading a novel, finding it fairly interesting at first, but then my interest tapers off dramatically. It’s interesting that I should struggle with McGahan’s Last Drinks, because I found the subject matter (corruption in 1980s Queensland and its aftermath) quite compelling. How is it that [...]

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In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly is J. J. DeCeglie’s first volume of short stories and second book overall. In some of these stories we are re-introduced to Sep (the sea is not yet full’s protagonist) or at least someone very much like him. Many of these stories overlap in their physical and [...]

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the sea is not yet full is the first novel by Perth writer J. J. Deceglie. Published in 2005, it is a story about a young man named Sep. Sep is in his early twenties, has a girlfriend named Sarah and a job as a teacher. He lives in Fremantle, Western Australia. Sep and myself [...]

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J. J. Deceglie is a Perth writer, author of two books: “the sea is not yet full” (a novel), and “In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly” (short stories). According to the biographical note in the front of the book of stories, “his works have been published in France, the United States, the United Kingdom, [...]

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1988 is McGahan’s second novel and prequel to his Vogel award-winning Praise. It’s written in the same straightforward style, with the same frankness and absence of guile, and with a similar sense of narrative drive. Exactly where this narrative drive comes from is a mystery to me, as there’s nothing especially interesting about the events [...]

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My new reading list contains five novels, four of which are by Andrew McGahan. I didn’t exactly plan it that way, but those were the books I picked up. So you can expect to see reviews of all five of McGahan’s novels in the near future, unless I can’t get through one or more of [...]

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You have to be in the right mood for reading Beckett. What that right mood is, I’m not exactly sure, but Beckett’s ‘novels’ are about as far away from the conventions of characterisation and narrative as you can get. Molloy (first in a trilogy including Malone Dies and The Unnameable) seems to be one of [...]

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