Book reviews, new books, publishing news, book giveaways, and author interviews

Thoughts on Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse

Thoughts on Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse

If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! Love Among the Chickens is my first foray into the work of Wodehouse; and as a fairly early work, its one of Wodehouses first forays into Wodehouse as well. A deliciously written farcical novel, it...

Review: Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Review: Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Melbourne is a city of serendipity and chance meetings, and I rather suspect that if Kevin Bacon lived in Melbourne I suspect that he would know everyone. I met my husband by chancetwice in one night at two different venues, in fact, but thats a story for a forthcoming reviewbut continue to be astonished by just how much our social circles...

Review: Tins by Alex Shearer

Review: Tins by Alex Shearer

In my experience, tins and fingers dont go well together. A few years back I found myself at the hospital after losing terribly in a battle against a tin of kidney beans.'Kidney beans are good for iron levels, I hear. Bleeding all over the kitchen floor, not so much. Oh, the agony of my hand and its plaintive sobs of haemoglobin. In tears, I called up...

Review: Preincarnate by Shaun Micallef

Review: Preincarnate by Shaun Micallef

Preincarnate is not so much a novella as it is a whorl of ideas fashioned into a jauntily tipped hat, with said hat draped over a grassy barrow of anachronisms, with said anachronistic barrow then dug up by a French avante garde film director, given the cut-up treatment, and the subsequently marinated in a brine of whimsy. If none of that made any sense but you...

Reading habits and prejudices and Joe Queenans One for the Books

Reading habits and prejudices and Joe Queenan's One for the Books

If books are an escapist tool, then surely books about books are a tool of solidarity: heres an opportunity for the most tragic of individuals, those who read about life rather than actually living it, to see that vicariously lived life lived out in book form. Vicariously. Whichever publisher came up with the deliciously recursive idea of the book about...

The purpose of chick-lit and Debby Holts Recipe for Scandal

The purpose of chick-lit and Debby Holt's Recipe for Scandal

Earlier this year I read Stephen Mays Life! Death! Prizes! (review) a title that refers to protagonist Billys nickname for those trashy magazines they stock by the counters of supermarkets and newsagents, the ones filled with stories about bizarre diseases, disturbingly weird relationships and twins separated at birth, and which are typically...