she/her Brisbane/Meanjin I like fancy cocktails, pro wrestling, and spooky shit.
Young filmmaker Naor is driving with his mother. Along the way, he tells his mother of his time in Tel Aviv, abandoned after a mandatory evacuation. Staying behind with his girlfriend Yaël, and his grandfather, Naor encounters a new side to his beloved city. As the bombs fall, the trio begin to make a film,…
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Drawing on lectures delivered in 2014 and 2017, Women & Power: A Manifesto is a small, yet powerful exploration of the historical silencing of women in the public sphere. The Ancient Roman and Greek cultures we so often hold up as the basis for our democracies today were never particularly kind to the loud woman…
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Paul and Michael Buchanan are in hiding. Moving from highland village to highland village, the brothers are trying to avoid the press and police surrounding their home after Michael’s release from prison. Convicted of the murder of a little girl when he was a teenager, Michael relies heavily on Paul to source them food and…
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Sarah Knight, anti-guru and author of best sellers The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving A Fuck and Get Your Shit Together, is back with another empowering message for her readers. Only this time they can actually print the book’s full title in The New York Times. Score! Are you difficult or do you just…
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It’s been thirteen years since Feel, music journalist Chris Heath’s first book with singer Robbie Williams. In that time, Williams has married and started a family, rejoined and left Take That, and further cemented his legacy as one of pop’s true superstars by breaking the Guinness World Record for most tour tickets sold in a…
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Elsie Bainbridge, newly widowed, is sent to her late husband’s estate to see out the last few weeks of her pregnancy. With a skeleton staff, abandoned, dusty rooms, and a surrounding village terrified of the house, The Bridge is far from the haven Elsie hopes it to be. But when she and Sarah, her husband’s…
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Join The Washington Post’s pop culture editor Hannah Jewell as she plucks (almost) forgotten women from the historical cutting room floor. From artists to investigative reporters, scientists to queens, political firebrands to murderers, there’s no such thing as the delicate fairer sex here. Get in the kitchen and make you sandwich? Puh-lease. I’ve got an…
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Find out what happens when the legendary Sherlock Holmes comes up against a distinctly Australian series of crimes, in Sherlock Holmes: The Australian Casebook. Commissioned by Holmes super fan Christopher Sequiera, The Australian Casebook sees the world’s greatest detective and his stalwart friend and chronicler head down under. Writers range from historical crime fiction mavens…
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Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson, the voices behind Guys We Fucked: The Anti-Slut Shaming Podcast, have travelled from the podcast to the page with F*cked: Being Sexually Explorative and Self-Confident in a World That’s Screwed. Put down the rom-com and stick the rosé back in the fridge because you don’t need a man, and Fisher…
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A true tale of mental illness told from the perspective of both the sufferer and the bewildered friend, Eyes Too Dry is a joint venture from Alice Chipkin and Jessica ‘Tava’ Tavassoli. Switching between Tava, a medical student slipping into a deep depression, and housemate Alice, losing herself in her friend’s darkening struggle, this graphic…
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In the first half of the twentieth century, the Australian media began spreading tales of a huge, lightning fast species of snake that was seemingly taking lives at a rate of knots. Attaining a near mythical status, the nguman, or taipan, was all too real. The press demonised them, wary farmers hunted them, and desperate…
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Famed American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is the focus of Alicia Inez Guzmán’s latest work, Georgia O’Keeffe At Home. Exploring the relationship between O’Keeffe’s location and the work she produced, Guzmán takes readers from Texas, to New York, to New Mexico, in a book that is part beautiful coffee table literature, part in depth art historical…
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Making its world premiere at Brisbane Festival, FUN HOUSE is a vibrant mix of circus acts, dance, and vaudevillian comedy, helmed by a unicorn and a bunny – who else?! It’s been (perhaps a little awkwardly) marketed as an all ages show, presented as a family friendly sister act to Strut & Fret’s other Brisbane…
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A female comedian, dressed as a male comedian, dressed as a silent Gaulier clown trying not to offend anyone. That is the premise of Zoe Coombs Marr’s award-winning show Trigger Warning, and it promises to have you in stitches. After a successful run last year that saw the Australian comedian win a Barry Award, Zoe…
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Several years ago, a virus came to Sicily. It stalked the adults, picking them off one by one, until all that remained was handful of children. Struggling to protect her younger brother, Astor, Anna knows her days are numbered. When she reaches adolescence, the disease will come for her too. Falling in with a boy…
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In the realm of Ellest a toxic and dangerous mist swarms across the land. Here, magic is forbidden, and those who practice it are disappearing. Drinking to dampen her emerging and unwanted powers, and to forget a turbulent past, nineteen year old Bleak plans to remain firmly out of the firing line. But when the…
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Jonathan Harker has been sent to deepest, darkest Transylvania, to do business with the mysterious Count Dracula, who wishes to move to England. But the Count has goals far more sinister than merely purchasing property in Victorian London. Trapping Jonathan in his castle, he reveals himself to be a vampire, plotting to make England his…
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The world is ending. On the eve of the apocalypse, seven actors come together to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that infamous tale of crippling indecision, madness real and feigned, and murder most foul. Over the course of the production, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur, as the cast try to come to terms…
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Heloise Chancey enjoys a life of luxury. From humble beginnings as a common prostitute, she has risen to become a sought-after courtesan, with a retinue of staff at her beautiful Mayfair home. But Heloise has a second occupation, one that would cause even more raised eyebrows. Armed with formidable detective skills and an inside knowledge…
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A ground breaker in early expressionism, Paula Modersohn-Becker sold only a few paintings in her lifetime. Torn between her home in northern Germany and the vibrant art scene of Paris, her subjects of choice were mothers and children, depicting them in ways that made contemporary critics both uncomfortable and excited in equal measure. The first…
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In 1892, Italian painter Girolamo Nerli travels to Samoa to paint famous author Robert Louis Stevenson, known to the locals as Tusitala, ‘the teller of tales’. His goal? To capture something of the Hyde within Stevenson’s Jekyll. Over a century later, art historian Lewis Wakefield makes the same pilgrimage, in search of the story behind…
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A group of teenagers come together for a party on the beach. But come morning, a fifteen year old girl is dead, raped and then beaten to death. The work of late playwright Nick Enright, Blackrock follows the aftermath of this terrible act, as the party-goers explore their guilt, whether as perpetrators or as bystanders,…
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Opening late last month at Brisbane’s Queensland Museum, Gladiators: Heroes of the Colosseum is an expansive and interactive look at one of Ancient Rome’s best known traditions and one of the Eternal City’s most enduring symbols. Curated in conjunction with some of Rome’s most prominent museums and institutions, Gladiators is a Brisbane exclusive, and I…
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Heart of Mist, the first in new fantasy series The Oremere Chronicles, hits bookshelves later this year. Ahead of the book’s release, AU Reviewer Jodie B. Sloan chatted to author Helen Scheuerer, to get the lowdown on the upcoming series and her new fantasy publishing house Talem Press. Can you tell us a little about…
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Shortlisted for the 2015 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers, No Way! Okay Fine is the first book from writer, editor and occasional DJ Brodie Lancaster. A series of personal essays, Lancaster tackles just about everything, from growing up in a small town and a year spent in New York City, to early brushes with feminism…
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Skye’s mum has a new boyfriend. His name is Jason and they’re all moving to Port Flinders with him. But Jason is bad news, and Skye’s mum is in too deep, unable – or unwilling – to see the danger Skye and her little brother, walking animal fact factory Ben, are in. So Ben and…
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An art memoir with a difference, A Forger’s Tale doesn’t trace the life and work of a celebrated artist, but that of Shaun Greenhalgh, one of Britain’s most infamous art forgers. A working class kid from England’s North West, whose backyard workshop was jokingly referred by police as “the northern annex of the British Museum,”…
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Written from a prison cell, British art forger Shaun Greenhalgh‘s memoir A Forger’s Tale details his life and work , from the faux Victorian pot lids of his childhood to the Armana princess that led Scotland Yard to his door. Accompanying the book’s release, The AU Review’s Jodie B. Sloan had a chat with Shaun about…
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One day, while waiting for her roommate’s new IKEA sofa to arrive, Helen Moran receives the news that her adopted brother has committed suicide. She orders a black turtleneck to wear to the funeral, leaves a message for her boss, and books a one-way flight back to Milwaukee. But her adoptive parents are surprised to…
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Immortalised in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim as master spy and gem trader Lurgan Sahib, Alexander Malcolm Jacob lived a life every bit as exciting as anything any author could have imagined. Now, John Zubrzycki, a former Delhi-based foreign correspondent, has pulled together extensive research to tell the story of The Mysterious Mr Jacob, bringing Nineteenth Century…
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