Bernard Caleo
Bernard Caleo is a member of the Readings events team
Review — 20 Apr 2023
Naked Ambition by Robert Gott
A youngish up-and-coming minister gets his portrait painted, a bit bigger than life size. He takes delivery of the canvas, hangs it on his living room wall, stands back admiringly…
Review — 3 Mar 2023
Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius by Thomas H Ford & Justin Clemens
Beware the lawyer poet who takes your land and beautifies his theft with literature. In 1817, Barron Field arrived to take the position of Judge of the Supreme Court of…
Review — 31 Oct 2022
Illuminations by Alan Moore
Alan Moore is the big beardy guy who gets pointed at when I’m asked, ‘Hey, who singlehandedly transformed superhero comics into dark, gritty and occasionally poetic narratives back in the…
Review — 31 Aug 2022
Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland by Jim Davidson
This gorgeously titled book delivers the Heroic Age epic of little magazine publishing inAustralia, ‘little magazines’ being a way to describe literary/cultural periodicalsinspired by the avant-garde Chicago journal, The Little…
Review — 28 Jun 2022
Lilly and Her Slave by Hans Fallada & Alexandra Roesch (trans.)
‘Hans Fallada’ is the nom de plume of Rudolf Ditzen (1893–1947), a German writer who chronicled desperate lives between the wars. His best-known novel, Alone in Berlin, published weeks…
Review — 28 Apr 2022
Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
The young female narrator of this debut novel set in China and America in the 1880s is kidnapped in its first sentence. Shocking as this act is, it proves to…
Review — 27 Jan 2022
The Islands by Emily Brugman
The Houtman Al Campbell is a Abrolhos is an archipelago of more than a hundred islands and coral reefs flung into the Indian Ocean 80 kilometres out from Geraldton. This…
Review — 31 Oct 2021
Men in My Situation by Per Petterson & Ingvild Burkey (trans.)
Men in My Situation paints a portrait of the effects of grief upon a fragile psyche, and as you are already guessing, the results ain’t pretty. Our first-person narrator, Arvid…
Review — 3 Oct 2021
Permafrost by S.J. Norman
The seven short stories in S.J. Norman’s Permafrost present us with word-etchings of varied settings – apartments, hotel rooms and front yards – against which the emotional action shudders uneasily…
Review — 1 Aug 2021
The Liquid Land by Raphaela Edelbauer & Jen Calleja
Austrian writer Raphaela Edelbauer studied Sprachkunst – Language Art – in Vienna. Her disturbing metafiction, Das flüssige Land, was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2019 and this…
