Tuesday, November 3, 2009

constantly squandered by the bestselling authors



I was searching for a page of Christina Stead links and couldn't find what I was looking for, so decided to make one, leaving off all the articles that hand you a few hundred words and then tell you to sign up to our site in order to read the rest. This is a shame, because there's a number of them out there, and most of them look potentially interesting. But all those dangled carrots - no, it's not fair to link them.


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Later, she adds: Some days after I first made this post, I realised that the list was becoming unwieldy. I kept finding new links and the whole thing grew longer. So I'm going to split it up.

Here, I've separated the lists of links into different posts under these headings:


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General Commentary on Christina Stead.

Commentary on The Man Who Loved Children.

Commentary on Letty Fox: Her Luck.

Commentary on miscellaneous other books published by Stead.


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4 comments:

  1. Deanne, this is fantastic! I have plans to buddy-read The Man Who Loved Chidren over the summer holidays, and I shall certainly be referring to these links when I do. Thank you so much:)
    Lisa

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  2. It's a pleasure. That's not even a pleasantry, it's quite true. I did it partly because I wanted something to link her name to under the 'Authors' bit in my sidebar, and Middlemiss' page, while pretty darn nice and a fabulously vivid shade of cerulean blue, was not exactly what I was looking for. You're lucky: I wouldn't mind having The Man Who Loved Kids to look forward to for the first time all over again. It's just a brilliant book, sort of bursting and roaring all over with power. That Slate writer's point about money is an especially astute one, I thought. Stead is one of the rare writers who really grabs hold of the idea of money (as a social force, as an intimate part of a person's life) and runs with it.

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  3. I hadn't realised how many there were to look forward to...

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  4. And they're all good too, in one way or another, although Miss Herbert is a weak point, I think, a book for Stead-completists rather than Stead-newcomers, and I'm Dying Laughing, as the LA Times review says, "falters." House of All Nations is a bravura performance. The People With the Dogs is her sunniest book. A Little Tea is merciless. The Salzburg Tales, her Decameron, just fizzes and zings. All good. Maybe I should write potted summaries of each and make a post out of it.

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