The Undying: A meditation on modern illness by Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer’s The Undying is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. I read it so slowly: it took me from early April until the end of June. Boyer is a poet and her prose is dense and resonant as poetry. It’s so loaded with … meaning? Undoing of meaning?

That this book is impossible to race through is one of its great virtues. In this and many other ways, it’s a perfect text for pandemic 2020: it forces you to slow down, to be deeply attentive and considerate, and, in particular, it brings home to you the fierce reality of a body in pain – and of the life-saving and life-destroying powers of the modern medical and pharmaceutical industries, their ruthless, violent, cost-minimising service to late capitalism in this age of digital media, data and screens.

new book, booksJane Gleeson-WhiteSeptember 17, 2020illness, cancer, The Undying, Anne Boyer, poetry, poet, nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize, pain, writing, women's writing

A House in Norway by Vigdis Hjorth

How different this year looks from the one I sketched onto the calendar on the wall above my desk in January. I was supposed to be giving a keynote in Oslo in March and speaking at a sustainability conference at Yale the following week, as well as speaking at various local writers’ festivals about the new edition of Six Capitals. Needless to say, all conferences and festivals have been postponed indefinitely.

The best thing about the cancelled Oslo-Yale trip was that in preparing for Oslo I read my first Norwegian novel in at least a decade: Vigdis Hjorth’s A House in Norway (2014).

books, new bookJane Gleeson-WhiteAugust 24, 2020fiction, Norway, A House in Norway, Vigdis Hjorth, literature, novel, women's writing

There's a new updated paperback edition of Six Capitals out in May 2020

I’m happy to say that a new, fully revised and updated paperback edition of Six Capitals is being published in May 2020 by Allen & Unwin. It seems very timely.

As I write we’re getting stark lessons in how important our communities and beautiful green and blue places are. We must value them in our economic, accounting, financial and legal systems. The new edition of Six Capitals updates the story of four movements that are designed to do just that - to value people and the planet.

Vale Les Murray, the bard of Bunyah Valley

Following the death of poet Les Murray on Monday I’ve been recalling an afternoon I spent with him sitting on the edge of the pier at Walsh Bay talking about poetry and life, his obsession with words, his bouts of depression, his experience of ‘erocide’ and abhorrence of mobs. We met up after a session at the 2005 Sydney Writers’ Festival so I could interview him for Good Reading magazine, but our conversation ranged far and wide until the sun was low in the sky, well beyond the assigned hour. He was on song, ebullient, overflowing with words. Here’s the story I wrote for Good Reading, August 2005.

Jane Gleeson-WhiteApril 30, 2019 Comments

Welcome to my new blog

Welcome to my new blog, where I’ll be writing about books I’m reading, art I’m seeing and other meanderings. My last book (Six Capitals) put me in touch with rich and powerful men and women who wanted to care about the natural world and the wellbeing of people, but their thinking seemed to default to returns on financial investments, profits and economic growth. It was as if they could imagine no other way. I’m partly grateful to have had the opportunity to have gone so deep into the belly of the beast of global capitalism, it was certainly clarifying - and partly appalled that I got lost there for so long. Perhaps I spoke the language of mainstream economics too well.

new bookJane Gleeson-WhiteFebruary 5, 2019Jane Gleeson-White, Six Capitals, mothers, mother tongue

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