Art, apocalypse and country people
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough. And each week we sift through piles of books to bring you news of the ones we find interesting.
And we're going to continue to explore favourite Australian books in the lead up to our Top 100 Australian Books Countdown and novelist, playwright and actor George Kemp watched someone jump into Sydney Harbour and that led him to his favourite Australian novel.
Okay, all will be revealed later on. Today's books, though, take us into underground mysteries and small-town lives in American writer Daniel Mason's Country People and two stories of art and friendship in Dave Eggers' Contrapposto.
And we turn away from realism in Australian poet Maria Takalanda's The End of Romance, a woman and her son surviving in a dystopian landscape where at the age of 16, young men are supposed to sail off to a new promised land.
OK, well, to get us into these books, let's say g'day to today's reviewers, performer and writer Tim Rogers from UMI and novelist Madeline Gray, whose book Chosen Family has just this week been released in the United States. Hello and hello.
Hello. Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.
Engorged with happiness to be here. Congratulations, Madeline. That's wonderful.
Oh, thank you.
Are you pleased with the cover?
I am. I think the cover's really beautiful, actually. It's a dog kind of being welcomed into a family of lions, which gets to the chosen family idea of the book very well. I mean, unfortunately, they didn't do my suggestion of a koala and kangaroos, but next time.
And you yourself, Tim, you've been off adventuring recently. You've been on tour.
I was over being my wife's handbag at the Houston Ballet Company and found some great bookstores in Houston and read some great writers. But the bookstore was the great one. It was a secondhand bookstore in the suburbs of Houston and I walked there every day. And on the fourth day, the owner approached me and said, are you the gentleman who was in the other day? And I thought, oh my God, I've left a puddle of sweat or something. It's high summer. But she said, we love it when English people come over here. And I said, I have to ask, what was it about me that made you think I was English? And she said, the way you dress. I didn't know quite how to take it. But then we went through Texas authors that they both loved, she and her partner.
And then they showed me the baseball section out the back, which was two other rooms of baseball books. So I came back with two suitcases full of great books from Houston. And that's about the end of the story.
Well, let's stick with American fiction. We've got a bit of a theme emerging here on the bookshelf because you've both read American novels for us. And we'll begin with the latest from Dave Eggers.
What books and guests set the agenda for this episode of The Bookshelf?
Now, Dave Eggers, you'll remember, shot to fame in the year 2000 with his book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I think everybody admired and hated at the same time who ever wanted to write a book because it was such a good title. Irresistible to pick up. But it did tell a very sad story and that was one that was paralleled to Dave Eggers' own life. His father died when... He and his siblings were young. He and his sister, Beth, were in their sort of late teens and they had a younger brother as well. And then the mother died very quickly soon after. And so the book was based on that experience.
And that was a book that was a sort of combination memoir and used fictional elements as well.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:49
2
What books and guests set the agenda for this episode of The Bookshelf?
3:49–15:20
3
How does Dave Eggers' Contrapposto explore art, craft and authenticity?
15:20–32:28
4
What scenes and characters introduce Cricket, Pia and the art-school conflict in Contrapposto?
32:28–1:01:04
5
How does Contrapposto stage the debate between conceptual art and technical skill?
1:01:04–1:02:46
Speakers
6 identifiedMore from The Bookshelf
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New Fiction from Melissa Harrison and Malcolm Knox + Mandy Sayer's Top 3
Top 100 Australian Books from Byron Writers Festival
Anjet Daanje's extraordinary The Stork and the Dromedary + Liane Moriarty returns with Big Little Truths
The Haunting Wild, a Trip to Mars and Dreaming of Escape in 1980's France
Miles Franklin winner Omar Musa + Booker-longlisted All Them Dogs and Téa Obreht's Sunrise