Brilliant Writing Careers - Andrew Crofts

By -
Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers

“Their Brilliant Careers – the Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers,” by Ryan O’Neill is a spoof literary history which contains so many characters and situations that will be painfully and hilariously recognisable to writers and publishers the world over it is tempting as a reader to simply suspend disbelief and go with the flow.

Each biography is written as a short story but the lives of the various writers soon start to intersect. There are many good jokes, even for those of us who are unfamiliar with the real Australian literary scene that it is satirising. It would be great to think that Mr O’Neill might one day turn his attention to the literary pretensions and deceptions of other cultures – just imagine what he could do with the Bloomsbury Set, Will Self, Martin Amis – or Jeffrey Archer.     


Comments

Umberto Tosi said…
Definitely one I've got to read! Thanks. And yes, so many other pretentious literary cultures beg for similar spoofing, for sure.
27 August 2018 at 21:46
Post a Comment

Popular posts

A Few Discreet Words About Caesar's Penis--Reb MacRath

By -
Image
Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There  was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts
Read more

Navigating by the Stars

By -
Image
Barbara Hughes in the Sportswoman's Library (BL permission) The title of my book has been changed: That Spirit of Independence has become Stars to  Steer By . It’s still a book of celebration, mentioning more than one hundred wonderful sea-women. And yes, they are all included because of their variously independent spirits. No change there. The title I chose myself was given me by a rebellious Solent racer called Barbara Hughes. She was racing slim, fast keelboats from the age of about 13 in 1885 and loved it: ‘It is the most delightful education in the world, the most interesting and healthful. It becomes so engrossing that you will not rest until you understand the whole thing and know the why and wherefore of all the different moves.’ Barbara was the 5th of 6 children so was usually subordinate to her father, brothers or older sisters. She wanted to be in charge of her own boat, competing on equal terms: ‘you should have it all in your own hands, with no one to say you “nay”, o
Read more

The Splendid Rage of Harlan Ellison - Umberto Tosi

By -
Image
A young Ellison, at his Olympia SG 3 Alas, we seem to be losing all the great ones lately. Well, this is a common illusion when some beloved figure dies. Last week it was Harlan Ellison, who died June 28, just a week ago in his sleep at 84, after suffering a stroke in 2014. Ellison was probably the least known famous writer in the world. To me and a lot of writers who were his fans, he epitomized everything the brilliant, provocative, flamboyant, prolific, wild-eyed writer ought to be - and usually fall short of. Whatever one thinks of his prodigious body of work, one could not fail to admire his ferocity as a creative spirit and human being. "Born without an off-switch," his friends said. He went, Energizer-Bunny-like, fully until he stopped. Jewish by birth, atheist by self-proclamation, Ellison lived consistently by the three great moral questions of Rabbi Hillel the Elder : "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? "If I am for myself alone, t
Read more

No, The Times Journalists at the Hay Literary Festival, Burglarising is Not What It's All About, says Griselda Heppel

By -
Image
  Imagine you’re a you ng journalist from  The Times , reporting on the Hay literary festival. Nice job if you love books and writing – which journalists do, or they’d be doing something else – and you should enjoy it while you can, as literary festivals are sadly in their   Götterdämmerung   p eriod, what with no corporate sponsor being pure enough to be allowed to fund them, and grants from such lofty organisations as the Arts Council being extremely unlikely, owing to books being lamentably highbrow and middle class (not!). Anthony Horowitz By Edwardx - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126308848 So there you are, listening to Anthony Horowitz speak on a panel on the subject of rewriting classics by dead authors in order to remove ‘offensive’ language ( as Puffin did last year with a new edition of Roald Dahl’s works ), and you hear him say he doesn’t approve of burglarising books.  Yup, that’s what he said. Well, he must have said that, there’
Read more

Opening Lines by Allison Symes

By -
Image
Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos Opening lines must hook a reader so they read the rest of your story or article. I aim to write  something which intrigues me, draft the rest, and as I do that, ideas occur to strength that first line. So I go back and do so. The act of writing something down in and of itself seems to trigger creativity to come up with more and better ideas. It’s a pity you can’t bottle that effect and bring it out when you need it! As I write a lot of flash fiction, where my maximum word count is 1000 words, the opening line carries even more weight. I see it as doing a lot of heavy lifting. Sometimes I will write circle stories where the closing line is a repetition of the opening one or is similar to it with, say, one minor change. That change has come about due to what happened in the story itself. I find, whatever I write, as long as I have something down to start me off, away I go happily. It can be finding the way into a piece whic
Read more