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The Good Doctor: What Patients Want Ron Paterson Auckland University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9781869405922 Neither title nor subtitle accurately reflects the thrust of this book. It is less about how we might distinguish the good doctor (and define what we…
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…
Sonnet Fuck your simile. Fuck your elegy for. Fuck your homily, your extended metaphor. Fuck your metonymy. Fuck your exquisite language economy. Fuck your metre, your keeping time. Fuck your vers libre. Fuck your rhyme. Fuck your Elizabethan men…
Kathryn Walls identifies the realism beneath Mahy’s magic. Margaret Mahy has been repeatedly described as “magical” or “marvellous”, her fiction as “fantastic.” These conveniently alliterating adjectives seem apt partly because so much of Mahy’s work is classifiable as fantasy, and…
Whithering or withering? Back in the day, literary couple Iris Murdoch and John Bayley used to speak of “whithering”. They were referring to international festivals at which they were asked to address the question “whither the novel?” At the dawn…
Novelist and poet Fiona Kidman recalls her first published book. When first asked to contribute this essay, my response was to beg another later book. My first novel, perhaps? On reflection, I saw this for the cowardice it was. The…
Margaret Mahy 1936-2012 The three most intelligent people I’ve known: Margaret Mahy, Ted Rye, Maurice Duggan, all storytellers, all dead. In them, the torrents of intellect and imagination came together like the staff of Hermes with its twining snakes Knowledge…
Volume 22 | Number 4 | Issue 100 | Summer 2012 Editorial Letters Guy Somerset: “No need for bookshelves” (comment) Peter Simpson: “Obsolescence is just the beginning” (comment) Harry Ricketts: “At the Frankfurt Bookfair: a triolet” (poem) Jane Westaway:…
Non-fiction Children of Rogernomics: A Neoliberal Generation Leaves School, Karen Nairn, Jane Higgins and Judith Sligo, Otago University Press, $45.00, ISBN 9781877578182 A four-year study of 93 young people reaching adulthood in the wake of Rogernomics. What they have to…
Ann Mallinson shares a letter she received 20 years ago. Margaret Mahy was, among many other things, an ideas person. She loved discussing ideas, and those of us who were lucky enough to have her accept an invitation to stay…
Home truths and fantasy worlds, Kathryn Walls
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