#ReviewWomen2015: It’s Time To Take Commercial Fiction Seriously
I couldn’t agree more with this recent article from the Huffington Post. Because whatever the statistics show us, there is a genre of fiction that rarely gets reviewed in any serious publication: and that’s ‘women’s fiction.’ Now, as I made clear last year, I don’t like the term ‘women’s fiction’. It’s an unnecessary clarification that…
Long articles – perfect for a long weekend
Australia Day falls on 26 January – a public holiday and a long weekend that often spells the end of school (and other) holidays. The English First Fleet – full of sailors, marines and convicts – arrived at what would become Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. So Australia Day is also known colloquially to…
Julian Barnes – What is literature for you?
I’ve spent some lovely, lazy hours this Christmas browsing through the many wonderful interviews with writers generously posted online by the Paris Review. One of the interviewers asked English novelist Julian Barnes “What is literature for you?” There are many answers to that question. The shortest is that it’s the best way of telling the…
Like Pushing an Elephant Into a Volkswagen
There seems to be theme emerging around my current selection of interesting articles about writing: how and when to find the time. This article by Liz Entman Harper is a beauty. She interviews seven writers who write while also holding down a day job. The myth of the full-time writer is a perniciously sticky one—and…