Blog Archives

Letters – Issue 101

Posted on March 1, 2013 by NZ Books

Congratulations The novelist, Alex Miller, who lives in Melbourne (the city where I mostly reside), said that “writing fiction is a dangerous occupation. It is an act of imagination that requires the writer to confront unclear aspects of the self;…

Tagged with: Autumn 2013, Issue 101
Posted in Letters

Letters – Issue 100

Posted on December 1, 2012 by NZ Books

It’s a polemic Your reviewer Louise O’Brien (NZB, Spring 2012) criticises me for not offering solutions “to the many problems which [The Passionless People Revisited] lays out so emphatically”. Oh dear. It is a polemic, a legitimate form of disputation…

Tagged with: Issue 100, Summer 2012
Posted in Letters

Letters – Issue 99

Posted on September 1, 2012 by NZ Books

The darker side of mania In his recent review of my memoir Taming the Tiger (NZB, Winter 2012) David Cohen pays me several nice compliments. Yet, on the whole, the review is written with an asininely superior style typical of…

Tagged with: Issue 99, Spring 2012
Posted in Letters

Letters – Issue 97

Posted on March 1, 2012 by NZ Books

New Zealand Books is now accessible to blind and partially sighted readers. Our 20th anniversary issue (Summer 2011) was the first to be made available to 2,900 sight-impaired magazine borrowers through the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind. It is also…

Tagged with: Autumn 2012, Issue 97
Posted in Letters

Letters – Issue 96

Posted on December 1, 2011 by NZ Books

Not a bar of it The cover of the Spring 2011 issue of NZB announces that “Elspeth Sandys keeps time with Quigley’s The Conductor”, but her disappointingly thin review falls short of doing justice to this complex and satisfying novel. …

Tagged with: Issue 96, Summer 2011
Posted in Letters

Letters – Issue 94

Posted on June 1, 2011 by NZ Books

Talking heads How refreshing that for Nelson Wattie (NZB Autumn 2011) the time has clearly come to no longer “go with the flow” – in this case, the incessant flow of information from writers talking about (their) writing and thereby…

Tagged with: Issue 94, Winter 2011
Posted in Letters

Letters – Issue 93

Posted on March 1, 2011 by NZ Books

Mulgan and malaria-induced depression In relation to Martin Edmond’s review of the new edition of John Mulgan’s Report on Experience (NZB, Summer 2010), one might suggest that the causes for Mulgan’s suicide in Cairo on 25 April 1945 could have…

Tagged with: Autumn 2011, Issue 93
Posted in Letters

Letters – Issue 92

Posted on December 1, 2010 by NZ Books

Arts and evolution In NZB (Winter 2010), Chris Else claims in regard to Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct and Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories, that “an evolutionary explanation of art, seductive though it might be to the reductive…

Tagged with: Issue 92, Summer 2010
Posted in Letters

Letters – Issue 91

Posted on September 1, 2010 by NZ Books

What’s in a name? John O’Leary in his review of Dominic Alessio’s edition of The Great Romance by “The Inhabitant” (NZB Autumn 2010) comments “we do not know who wrote it”. But the National Library’s wonderful searchable site of New…