On the surface, Helen Garner’s sharp and insightful novella The Spare Room, is a relatively straightforward tale of friendship under duress. Nicola has stage-four bowel cancer and has decided to abandon traditional treatments in favour of a punishing alternative regime. She is coming to Melbourne to attend the Theodore Institue for a three-week course of…
Ray Bradbury defies categorisation. Best known for his science fiction and fantasy works like Farenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, my first encounter with his writing was Dandelion Wine, a beautiful and evocative novel of childhood and memory. Yet again he has confounded my expectations with The October Country, his 1955 collection of nineteen macarbe…
The Stepford Wives needs no introduction. Thanks to not one, but two movie adaptations, it has a plot so famous as to have entered cultural discourse – everyone knows what a Stepford Wife is now, but the novel upon which the films are based is a much more interesting and ambiguous affair. It is in…
In 1999, riding the wave of interest in Korean horror movies, Takashi Miike’s Audition hit our cinemas and subsequently appeared on every ‘Best Horror Films of All Time’ list with remarkable regularity. The source material for the film was written by Ryu Murakami in 1997 and its horror is of a much more insidious kind.…
Read more No 469 Audition by Ryu Murakami, translated by Ralph McCarthy
In ‘Cellists’, the final, and the best story in Nocturnes, an American woman pretends to be a world-famous cellist and tutors a talented young Hungarian in her hotel room in an unnamed Italian city. Under her tutelage, his playing soars – both technically and emotionally – but he soon realises that she cannot play the…
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I'm Katy.
For mostly adult, literary, fiction; focusing on historical, contemporary, biographical, and women.
"There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others"
