Emily Paull

** This review originally appeared on The AU Review on April 15 2021** The back cover of   Barry Divola ‘s debut novel  Driving Stevie Fracasso   makes some lofty claims. It promises  High Fidelity  meets  The Big Lebowski   meets  The Darjeeling Limited ; it promises Nick Hornby, David Nicholls and Jonathan Tropper vibes. Picking it up, I thought to myself that this one novel could not possibly live up to all that. But here’s the thing, it can, and it does. Driving Stevie Fracasso  is the story of Rick McLennan, a music journalist who has just turned forty. His girlfriend of seven years, Jane (whom he struck up a conversation with in the first place because she was wearing a Boston t-shirt and looked so uncool that she was therefore possibly the coolest person ever, if that tells you what kind of people these characters are) has just broken up with him, leaving him without a place to live. The small free music magazine that he’s been reviewi...

  ** This review was originally published on The AU Review on July 29 2021** A mother cuts her daughter’s hair because her own starts falling out. A woman leaves her boyfriend because he reminds her of a corpse; another undergoes brain surgery to try to live more comfortably in higher temperatures. A widow physically transforms into her husband so that she does not have to grieve. This is  She is Haunted ,  the debut collection of short stories by Asian/Australian/American writer  Paige Clark . It is the short story collection that everyone was (or should have been) talking about this July. As its title suggests,  She is Haunted  is informed by grief and death. In the opening story (“Elisabeth Kubler-Ross”), a woman bargains with God not to take her lover, instead allowing the deity (who is surprisingly both human, and persuadable) to take her elderly mother instead. In “Times I’ve Wanted to be You”, a woman whose husband has recently died begins to dress a...

**This review was originally published on The AU Review on September 30 2021** Diana Reid   was well on her way to a career in theatre, when COVID-19 saw the cancellation of  1984! The Musical , a production she co-wrote and produced. In lockdown, she decided to turn her hand to writing a book. The result is   Love & Virtue , a masterpiece of ‘millennial fiction’ which is already garnering comparisons to Sally Rooney. The novel follows a young woman named Michaela who has moved from Canberra to Sydney to attend University. She has received a scholarship to live in Fairfax College; there she meets the enigmatic and highly opinionated Eve, who lives in the room next door to hers. Eve is staunchly feminist, and has a personality which polarises her peers. While Michaela feels both drawn to her and intimidated by her, Eve is not a part of her ‘circle of friends’, rather she is someone she hangs out with separately. The nuances of their relationship, which is part attracti...

Do you ever find yourself making mental lists of all the things you should be doing, and then just.... doing none of them?  Yeah. Same.  At the beginning of this year, I sat down and I made a list of 21 things that I was going to try to accomplish in 2021. I tried to make these things specific, measurable, etc. But I also tried to make them things that I would enjoy. I divided my list up into family things, friend things, career things, writing things and health things. Truth be told, it was difficult to fill all 21, but I got there eventually. I've always been a goal-oriented person. I like checking things off these sorts of lists. Every year for a while, I was trying to read my way through the Dymocks 101 best books list until I realised that when you allow the public to vote on things like that, books that really aren't your taste are always going to make it in. (Life is too short to read bad books.) But as we all know, 2021 has been a weird year off the back of another wei...