Just a quick note to say that I wrote an ‘in brief’ review of the excellent short story collection The Kid on the Karaoke Stage and Other Stories, edited by Georgia Richter (Aus), for this month’s Australian Book Review, out now in print and online. Here’s an extract:
‘While the stories in The Kid on the Karaoke Stage vary thematically, they are predominantly realist in style, with plenty of seemingly serendipitous through-lines. Georgia Richter, who has edited the collection superbly, says that she was interested in “the way we turn to writing to crystallise moments of realisation”. The authors all have links to Western Australia, but their ‘moments of realisation’ are refreshingly global, particularly in the later stories.
There are coming-of-age stories, off-kilter stories, sad ones, stories of internal and external landscapes, and a few that are wonderfully strange…’
The issue also features Colin Nettelbeck on Sartre, Brian McFarlane on The Tempest, Jo Case on childhood autism, Morag Fraser on Joyce Carol Oates’ widowhood, Joel Deane on Julian Assange, Colin Golvan on copyright and the internet, the announcement of the Calibre Prize winners and, of course, plenty of reviews. I look forward to getting stuck into it.
