The Sydney Theatre Company’s captivating revival of the 1975 play, co-produced with Dublin’s Gate Theatre, manages to balance the loathing and humour of Thomas Bernhard’s writing.
- Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
British writer Angela Carter was a creative trailblazer. And in 1979, she published a book attempting the near impossible, claiming Sade –pornographer and literary bad boy – as a proto-feminist.
While there is much to praise in The Lehman Trilogy, now playing in Sydney, the impression I was left with was one of a missed opportunity.
The new TV series, Feud: Capote vs the Swans tells the story behind Answered Prayers, the never-finished gossip novel that made its author a social pariah. But what was in the book – and was it any good?
Alexander Howard stumbled on spymaster John Le Carré soon after relishing a James Bond film. And he was instantly hooked on George Smiley, Le Carré’s unglamorous bureaucrat-detective – an unlikely hero.
The Wolves of Eternity is remarkable – and deliberately challenging. Ranging across time and space, it muses on thinking trees, Putin’s Moscow, a Norwegian heatwave and the undead.
Plan your summer reading or catch up on what you missed with The Conversation’s selection of the best books of the year.
The venerated and critically acclaimed Shane MacGowan has died in Dublin at the age of 65.
The serious and subtle aspects of The Seagull – many of which continue to resonate today – are lost in this new production.
Eamon Flack gives Bulgakov’s classic epic novel a riotous interpretation.
The winners of the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced – and they’re a diverse bunch of books, with a focus on reconnection, regeneration, questioning and beauty.
John le Carré and Ian Fleming, the world’s most famous spy novelists, share experience in UK intelligence and difficult childhoods. But their heroes, George Smiley and James Bond, are very different.
What seems at first blush to be an innovative approach to franchise movie-making is nothing more than a futile exercise in cinematic nostalgia.
Bagi Jon Fosse, orang Norwegia keempat yang memenangkan Nobel Sastra tahun 2023, menulis telah menjadi cara untuk bertahan hidup.
Para Jon Fosse, el cuarto noruego galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Literatura 2023, escribir ha sido una forma de sobrevivir.
For Jon Fosse, the fourth Norwegian to win the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, writing has been a way of surviving.
Nadia Comăneci was the most famous gymnast in the world when she defected from Romania in 1989. A new book includes 25,000 pages worth of secret police surveillance material.
In the 1957 worldwide bestseller, Australia is – briefly – the last habitable place on earth, following a nuclear world war. One character asks, as they wait to die: ‘Why did all this happen to us?’
Ayn Rand’s dystopian fable about government meddling in free-market arrangements remains hugely influential, including with Elon Musk. Donald Trump, too, is an Ayn Rand fan. Why is she so popular?
Over 50 years, over 50 million copies have been sold. Pink Floyd’s masterwork will continue to resonate with listeners for a while yet.
Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in 13 years blurs fact and fiction, mining his youth for material. The result is Joan Didion meets Brian De Palma.
Bret Easton Ellis’s grotesquely violent novel is irreducibly misogynist, racist and homophobic. So was Reagan’s America. It’s less darkly comic satire than deadly serious social diagnostic.
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