Lot by Bryan Washington was my book of the year in 2019 and you can read that review here and I have been eagerly awaiting his novel Memorial for some time, staring wide eyed with delight at the announcements as they etched closer to a release date – and then the day was finally here,
It’s been a busy year again here at STORGY and I’ve been reading everything and everything yet again – from the big hitting publishers to the brave publishing of Independent Presses (which are putting out some astonishing works of late) to some self published works. Not to mention the hundreds of short stories I’ve read
STORGY reviewer Mariah Feria gives us a rundown of the best books she read in 2019 – and there are a few great books on this list! Enjoy! The Gallows Pole Benjamin Myers, published by Bluemoose Books This is a spectacular novel, and probably the book that I think back to most regularly. Even though
Another urgent and powerful collection from Atlantic Books. Xuan Juliana Wang provides us with a gripping and impressive collection. A collection that is told in three distinct parts – Family, Love & Time and Space. Each part of the book focuses on real lives, circumstance, immigrant life, the loss of culture, the fading of the
This book quite literally blew me away, knocked the wind out of my lungs and had me crawling amongst my tattered dreams of wanting to be a writer – because, you see, Bryan Washington is the writer I want to be. Washington delivers a beguiling collection of intimate portraits of the lost and silenced voices
When it comes to the canon of literature, Australian writers do not get nearly enough credit. This review is my effort to change that. For Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott’s Flames is an ambitious and powerful example of magical realism, in which the author explores the nature of grief and family bonds in ways they have
The Novel, most often, is a simple entity. It’s job, by-and-by, is to be read. It runs from left to right and front to back and tells you what it wants to be known; quite often it runs chronologically and even more often there are only a small number of characters that you need to
What is it exactly that makes a good character? Everyone seems to have an opinion. Plot is not the point, didn’t you know? It’s character. Or, if you want to be pernickety like Hemmingway, you could say ‘that when writing a novel, the writer should create living people, people not characters.’ Ah people, well that
