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Peter Craven Peter Craven i(A8523 works by)
Born: Established: ca. 1951 ;
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 The Necromancy of Solipsism : Gerald Murnane’s Shameless Aesthetic Privacies Peter Craven , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 438 2021; (p. 41)

— Review of Last Letter to a Reader Gerald Murnane , 2021 selected work criticism essay

'No contemporary Australian writer has higher claims to immortality than Gerald Murnane and none exhibits narrower tonal range. It’s a long time since we encountered the boy with his marbles and his liturgical colours in some Bendigo of the mind’s dreaming in Tamarisk Row (1974). There was the girl who was the embodiment of dreaming in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976). After The Plains (1982) came the high, classic Murnane with his endless talk of landscapes and women and grasslands, like a private language of longing and sorrow and contemplation.' (Introduction)

1 Watching Peter Craven , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2021; Meanjin , Summer vol. 80 no. 4 2021;

'It’s one of the paradoxes of cultural history that we are forever denying whatever is transforming the way we experience the world. Just at the moment (though it’s been a long moment) we’re worried about smartphones—the porn, the bullying, the hook-ups with God knows who to do God knows what, the trolls and the pervs and the endless nervy distraction.'  (Introduction)

1 An Adelaide Writer on the World Stage Peter Craven , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 24 July 2021; (p. 17)

— Review of Life as Art : The Biographical Writing of Hazel Rowley Hazel Rowley , 2021 selected work biography

'Hazel Rowley is the most heroic figure in the history of Australian biography. This woman, who died freakishly of what looked like a chill 10 years ago in New York, turned herself into a biographer of international stature out of a sheer passion to tell the truth about human life as a nonfiction narrative. Her sister, Della Rowley, and a close friend, Lynn Buchanan, have put together a collection of her pieces. They are not chronological; they’re repetitious and follow no set order, but they have a luminous and obsessive power.' (Introduction)

1 Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith Peter Craven , 2021 single work column
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 10-16 April 2021;

'Joanna Murray-Smith is indisputably one of Australia’s international theatre stars. I knew someone who compared her to the Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: a figure of fugitive but irrevocable glamour.' (Introduction)

1 A Dark, Dazzling Drama by a Master of Lunacy Peter Craven , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 20 March 2021; (p. 14)

— Review of The Hands of Pianists Stephen Downes , 2021 single work novel
1 Clive James, The Fire of Joy Peter Craven , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 5-11 December 2020;

— Review of The Fire of Joy 2020 anthology poetry

'It’s typical of Clive James to leave us an anthology of poems he knows by heart that is eccentric and compelling in equal measure, with an introduction that will charm you, even if you’re dumbfounded by his selections.' (Introduction)

1 Painter’s Eye and a Poet’s Ear Peter Craven , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 28 November 2020; (p. 14)

— Review of One Day I'll Remember This : Diaries 1987-1995 Helen Garner , 2020 single work diary

'Helen Garner’s diaries have always been some kind of overriding preoccupation for this writer who breaks down the barrier between fiction and nonfiction. Forty years ago her detractors declared of Monkey Grip, arguably the most game-changing novel in Australian history, that it was simply her diaries regurgitated and dressed up as art.' (Introduction)

1 Feaver Dreams Peter Craven , 2020 single work column
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 28 November - 4 December 2020;

'At 31, Kendall Feaver continues her brilliant career with her new adaptation of Miles Franklin for Belvoir. “I’m wary of black-and-white thinking … I’m interested in the ‘why’. Why is this fracture happening? Why is this so divisive, so deeply felt and fought over?” By Peter Craven.' 

1 The Great Might Have Been Peter Craven , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , Spring vol. 79 no. 3 2020;
1 Steven Conte, The Tolstoy Estate Peter Craven , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 5-11 September 2020;

— Review of The Tolstoy Estate Steven Conte , 2020 single work novel

'Steven Conte won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his first novel, The Zookeeper’s War, so it’s not hard to imagine that this new book, The Tolstoy Estate, has been much awaited in the 12 years since. The proof copy came with an absurd cover-sized puff about this being “a novel for people who still believe in the saving grace of literature in dark times”, which is enough to put anyone off. But The Tolstoy Estate is in fact a fine novel – grave, moving and engaging – and it will absorb every kind of reader with its weirdly humane war story in which the military characters are German medics. The span of the action – which encompasses a strange dislocated love story yet is also a meditation on literature and Tolstoy in particular – is beautifully handled, with an absolute sureness of step even though its structure seems fractured and not intrinsically probable or, on the face of it, viably shapely.' (Introduction)

1 Losing the Plot, or Taming It? Peter Craven , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 1 August 2020; (p. 16)

— Review of The Sandpit Nicholas Shakespeare , 2020 single work novel

'Nicholas Shakespeare has done everything and known everybody in his time. As a boy in Argentina, he read to Jorge Luis Borges­; as a literary editor in London in his early 20s, he published­ reviews by Dirk Bogarde; as a biographer, he wrote a reliable account of that starry bewilderment of a man Bruce Chatwin; as a novelist, his The Dancer Upstairs was turned into a film directed by John Malkovich.' (Introduction)

1 Threading the Eye of a Needle Peter Craven , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 6 June 2020; (p. 16)

— Review of Richard Cooke on Robyn Davidson Richard Cooke , 2020 single work essay
1 Patrick Mullins, The Trials of Portnoy Peter Craven , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 20-26 June 2020;

— Review of The Trials of Portnoy : How Penguin Brought down Australia's Censorship System Patrick Mullins , 2020 single work criticism

'It’s instructive to remember what a relatively illiberal society Australia was only a few decades ago and this account of the obscenity court cases about Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in the early 1970s – written by a young author who wrote a much-praised biography of Billy McMahon – is a good reminder of this. When Gough Whitlam came in, everything changed so that Australians saw a fuller version, say, of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris than the British, but the period was a crossroads.' (Introduction)

1 Ronnie Scott, The Adversary Peter Craven , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 2-8 May 2020;

— Review of The Adversary Ronnie Scott , 2020 single work novel

'This is a rather extraordinary first novel. It is written in a style that ravishes the reader because it is constantly inventive and nervily inflected with a maximum suggestiveness. Ronnie Scott is superb at capturing the intimations and innuendos that any human heart – perhaps especially a not fully formed, post-adolescent one – is capable of. He is as good at evoking a world of young men who are a bit in love with, certainly not uninterested in, each other. But The Adversary is too talented a piece of debut fiction to be received with hands-off courtesy. The besetting problem of this putative novel that everyone should have a look at – to cotton on to a writer who has a wizardly quicksilver command of language – is that not enough happens in the book, and the author’s apparent belief that it does comes to seem like naivety.' (Introduction)

1 Sean O’Beirne : A Couple of Things Before the End Peter Craven , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 7-13 March 2020;

— Review of A Couple of Things Before the End : Stories Sean O'Bierne , 2020 selected work short story

'Every so often we’re reminded with a jolt that Australian realism doesn’t – to use Patrick White’s phrase – have to be dun-coloured. In fact it can be kinky, it can be ludic, it can be in the tradition of that shaggiest of shaggy-dog stories, Furphy’s Such Is Life, which begins with that immortal and immemorially appealing Australian sentiment, “Unemployed at last!”' (Introduction)

1 A Star Is Justly Reborn Peter Craven , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 4 January 2020; (p. 14)

— Review of Judith Anderson : Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage Desley Deacon , 2019 single work biography

'For a long time there Dame Judith Anderson was the most famous Australian actress in the world. She wasn’t a huge film star like Errol Flynn (with whom she shared a quite discernible Australian accent) but in my childhood she was prominently featured in the supporting cast of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, she was Big Mama to Burl Ives’s Big Daddy in the Elizabeth Taylor/Paul Newman Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and to cap everything off she gave what actor Peter Eyre described as one of the most vivid performances in the history of the world: the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in Hitchcock’s 1940 tribute to post-Bronte-style Gothic romance, Rebecca. She was a ­famous Lady Macbeth and an implacable Lavinia in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, and she gave the most ­celebrated 20th-century performance in a Greek tragedy when she stormed the New York stage (and a lot of others around the world) as ­Euripides’ Medea. Not even Laurence Olivier’s ­Oedipus Rex ranks so high.' (Introduction)

1 Publisher and Writer Hilary McPhee Peter Craven , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 30 November - 6 December 2019;
'Once a powerhouse of Australian publishing, Hilary McPhee traded the comfortable life she knew for a mysterious job with Middle Eastern royalty. In writing about this adventure and the collapse of her marriage to Don Watson in her new memoir, Other People’s Houses, she traces her strange journey back to herself. “I dreaded coming back to Australia because I left feeling I’d lost everything, I’d lost my marriage. We’d been together for more than 20 years, so it was quite a lot of life.”' (Article summary)
1 Helen Garner : Yellow Notebook Peter Craven , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 2-8 November 2019;

— Review of Yellow Notebook : Diaries Volume I, 1978-1986 Helen Garner , 2019 single work diary

'The myth of Helen Garner’s diaries is immense. When she published Monkey Grip 40-odd years ago, with its riveting depiction of emotional and drug squalors in inner-urban Melbourne, she evoked a world that had never been written about before. But the novel’s heartbreaks and contentments, with its central portrait of Javo the junkie, were accused of being just diaries rehashed as fiction. The alternative view of the Garner diaries is that they constitute her major life’s work: that when they saw the light of day – presumably, people thought, after her death – they would be acknowledged as one of the great journals of lived experience, up there with Pepys and Gide.' (Introduction)

1 As the Academy Falls Silent, Who Will Guard Our Stories Peter Craven , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 19 October 2019; (p. 24)
1 Inelegant Dissent and Whispers of Wisdom Peter Craven , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 9 March 2019; (p. 21)

— Review of Green Shadows and Other Poems Gerald Murnane , 2019 selected work poetry

'What an odd thing it is that Gerald Murnane, the great Australian minimalist who modulates the monotonies of his flawless sentences the way Rothko modulates his shades of colour, the 80-year-old Australian writer touted as an outsider (but less so now) for the Nobel Prize in Literature, should produce such a strange yet revealing book of poems.'  (Introduction)

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