Sunday Shout-out: centenary edition of Dubliners

 

The pottiness of poets

             

Plain or Fancy: Sheila Heti, Lena Dunham, Marjana Gaponenko, Rabih Alameddine

    

Mandolins and fancy-dress

 

 

Women are attracted to appalling men….

Sunday Slice: A Cat Found, The Birds Unbound*

  

White Rabbit Syndrome and a dream of A. E. Ellis

 

Guardian First Book Award shortlist

Fiona McFarlane’s The Night Guest has made it on to the shortlist of 5 for the Guardian First Book Award.  (Matthew Thomas’ We Are Not Ourselves, which we reviewed here, missed out). No, we aren’t Fiona McFarlane’s agents – it’s just a very good book. You can read Fiona’s own comments about the book here, for a much-needed balance to the peculiar Sydney Morning Herald piece we linked to in our Barbara Jefferis post.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/15/first-book-award-the-shortlist

The other books are:

Colin Barrett: Young Skins (short stories)

Henry Marsh: Do No Harm ( a neurosurgeon’s life)

Evan Osmos: Age of Ambition (reportage about China)

May-Lan Tan: Things to make and break (short stories)

The winner will be announced on November 26th. Any bets?

Sunday haiku

Spring an otter bright with sparkling water

          *

Wind at the corners of the house

these days

you never meet my eyes

 *

around his grave

native flowers

at home in clay

 *

melaleuca

touching the moving river

dreams…dreams…

 *

crow in the birdbath splinters the sun

*

Some of these haiku have appeared in First Australian Haiku Anthology 2001  and A Hundred Gourds 2011

photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blacktigersdream/9496987544

The empty frame of tomorrow – Proust on procrastination

It’s cheering to know Proust had this problem too….

Ceridwen Dovey: Blood Kin (Atlantic Books, 2007)