Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Susan Midalia
Susan Midalia reviews ‘Matia’ by Emily Tsokos Purtill
Matia UWA Publishing, $34.99 pb, 265 pp Fiction When individualism meets superstition Emily Tsokos Purtill’s first novel, Matia, is both ambitiously expansive and, narrated as a series of moments in time, deftly miniaturised. Spanning four individual decades from 1940 to 2070, and moving between continents, it details the lives of four generations of Greek-Australian mothers and daughters.
Susan Midalia reviews 'Gunflower' by Laura Jean McKay
Laura Jean McKay’s new collection, Gunflower, offers a range of disturbing, deftly satiric, and sometime bizarre short stories. As in her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (2022), some of the stories in the collection explore the relationship between the human and non-human, and often challenge rational explanations or simple allegorical interpretations for the imaginative worlds they create. Even the conventional realist narratives sometimes defy generic conventions.
Susan Midalia reviews 'Where Light Meets Water' by Susan Paterson
Fiction An admirably ambitious début Where Light Meets Water by Susan Paterson Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 400 pp Fiction An admirably ambitious début Susan Paterson’s first novel, Where Light Meets Water, offers readers the various pleasures of the traditional Bildungsroman. Spanning the years 1847 to 1871, it centres on the life of Thomas Rutherford, a man torn between devotion to his work as a mariner and an abiding passion for painting seascapes.
Susan Midalia reviews 'Jesustown: A novel' by Paul Daley
Paul Daley will be familiar to many readers as a respected journalist expressly committed to exposing the blind spots of white culture’s dominant myths about Indigenous history and Australia’s national identity. Daley is perhaps less well known as a novelist and playwright. These two interests in his work – historical research and imaginative writing – inform his powerful second novel, Jesustown, Daley’s seventh book, and one which he felt ‘compelled’ to write.
Susan Midalia reviews 'Bodies of Light' by Jennifer Down
Fiction Reinvention as fact and metaphor Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 433 pp Fiction Reinvention as fact and metaphor Jennifer Down (photograph by Leah Jing McIntosh/Scribe) Australian novelist and short story writer Jennifer Down has been rightly acclaimed, with an impressive list of awards to her name, including the Jolley Prize in 2014. Her new novel, Bodies of Light, is both much more ambitious in scope than her first and an altogether more harrowing read.
Susan Midalia reviews 'Bodies of Light' by Jennifer Down
Fiction Reinvention as fact and metaphor Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 433 pp Fiction Reinvention as fact and metaphor Jennifer Down (photograph by Leah Jing McIntosh/Scribe) Australian novelist and short story writer Jennifer Down has been rightly acclaimed, with an impressive list of awards to her name, including the Jolley Prize in 2014. Her new novel, Bodies of Light, is both much more ambitious in scope than her first and an altogether more harrowing read.
Susan Midalia reviews 'All That I Remember About Dean Cola' by Tania Chandler, 'Catch Us the Foxes' by Nicola West, and 'Spring Clean for the Peach Queen' by Sasha Wasley
Fiction Three narratives of women’s experience Fiction Three narratives of women’s experience Three recent novels by Australian women deal with current and increasingly urgent political questions about female identity and embodiment. They each use the conventions of popular realist fiction to provoke thought about the causes of female disempowerment and the struggle for self-determination.
Susan Midalia reviews 'The Road to Woop Woop and other stories' by Eugen Bacon
Fiction An inventive collection by Eugen Bacon The Road to Woop Woop and other stories by Eugen Bacon Meerkat Press, $16.95 pb, 192 pp Fiction An inventive collection by Eugen Bacon Eugen Bacon’s début short story collection, The Road to Woop Woop, plays with the genres of speculative fiction and magic realism. Using familiar tropes such as time travel, shapeshifting, and prescient characters, the stories typically refuse formulaic outcomes.
Susan Midalia reviews 'Ordinary Matter' by Laura Elvery
Short Stories Reviewed by Susan Midalia • Ordinary Matter by Laura Elvery University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 276 pp Short Stories Reviewed by Susan Midalia • Laura Elvery’s second short story collection, Ordinary Matter, shows the same talent for precise observation, pathos, and humour as her accomplished début collection, Trick of the Light (2018).
Susan Midalia reviews 'Ordinary Matter' by Laura Elvery
Short Stories Reviewed by Susan Midalia • Ordinary Matter by Laura Elvery University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 276 pp Short Stories Reviewed by Susan Midalia • Laura Elvery’s second short story collection, Ordinary Matter, shows the same talent for precise observation, pathos, and humour as her accomplished début collection, Trick of the Light (2018).
Susan Midalia reviews 'Wild Fearless Chests' by Mandy Beaumont, 'No Neat Endings' by Dominic Carew, 'Shirl' by Wayne Marshall, and 'A Couple of Things Before the End' by Sean O’Beirne
Fiction Reviewed by Susan Midalia • Fiction Reviewed by Susan Midalia • The American writer Jack Matthews had no time for what he called ‘a discontent’ with the brevity of the short story. ‘Ask a coral snake,’ he declared, ‘which is as deadly as it is small.’ The claim for ‘deadliness’ certainly applies to four recent début collections; in the tight spaces of the short story, each one presents confronting ideas about contemporary Australia.
Susan Midalia reviews 'Melting Moments' by Anna Goldsworthy, 'The Light After the War' by Anita Abriel, and 'Wearing Paper Dresses' by Anne Brinsden
Three recent début novels employ the genre of the Bildungsroman to explore the complexities of female experience in the recent historical past. Melting Moments by Anna Goldsworthy Black Inc., $29.99 pb, 240 pp Anna Goldsworthy, widely known and admired as a memoirist, essayist, and musician, has now added a novel, Melting Moments, to her list of achievements.
The Professor and the Madman
When the British author Simon Winchester published the book The Surgeon of Crowthorne in 1998, the idea was, according to his editor, to ‘make lexicography cool’. The non-fiction work told the bizarre and oddly uplifting Victorian-era tale of the autodidactic linguist and scholar Sir James Murray and his relationship with William Chester Minor, a retired American army surgeon incarcerated at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Susan
Contact Susan, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack