An advance review is in for Portable Curiosities: 4.5 stars in Books + Publishing. ‘Armed with an uncanny ability to capture the zeitgeist of the time—whether it be contemporary society’s obsession with foodie culture or institutionalised racism and misogyny—Australian writer Julie Koh’s darkly satirical and convulsively funny short-story collection Portable Curiosities is as unsettling as it is edifying.’ […]

The comeback edition of The Lifted Brow (No. 14) is out now. In it is a super short review I wrote about Peter Corris’ 1980 crime fiction debut, The Dying Trade, which introduced the wisecracking, hardboiled detective, Cliff Hardy. My piece was part of a team effort to review 30 Australian classics recently released by Text Publishing. The Text […]

This was always going to be a biased review. Murakami is one of my literary idols. In the past few years, I’ve read more books by him than by any other author and his work has had a strong influence on my own fiction writing. So I was one of the fans eagerly counting down […]

Hey kids that’s a snap of my old pal buddha havin a giggle at a hipster party we were at and next to him is that new book by miles vertigan called life kills which i’d heard sorta avoids the middle path but is zen funny so anyway the minute my copy came in the […]

An exciting package arrived by courier yesterday from Random House. Inside was a copy of the hotly anticipated English translation of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, which will be available in Australian bookstores on 1 November. Random House has selected me, and a number of other Australian bloggers, to review 1Q84 as part of its online “Murakami […]