Mad Max Fury Road will walk away with seven Oscars this year. Three Oscars less than this masterpiece warrants. 
The ones that really matter and that Fury Road deserves to win – Picture, Director, and Cinematography – will go to …
Hectic beginning to the year after moving back home from Vietnam. Started a PhD, second child on the way, so much cricket to watch.
My writing output has suffered: it’s the worst start to a year, in terms of words, …
I love this town.
The frenetic pace, the unapologetic culture, the dynamism of Hanoi. This is a city always 
on the move; horizontal, with scooters swarming through teaming streets; vertical, as mammoth yellow cranes raise buildings up from craters into …
Abroad
They say the most stressful experiences are as follows:
Moving countries has a lot of 3 and 5 in it, plus saying goodbye to friends. I’ve just moved …
I saw a bunch of movies, read around fifty books, and found time to watch a few different TV series this year. I’ve collated the best of that I can remember – and presumably sticking in the mind is one …
Let me make one thing clear before this rant begins: Starkiller Base looks amazing. The First Order standing out there on the plain, fucking space Nazis – that was a great shot. The Force Awakens, too, is a welcome …
Australian editor, writer, and reviewer David McDonald is running a series on his blog called ‘Paying for Our Passion’. The issue is a salient one: the sacrifices authors make in the current economic in order to be able to write. …
I assumed The Paris Review, a literary publication I’ve only ever been dimly aware of, was too high-brow for genre. Man, was I wrong. They’ve published wide-ranging interviews with the likes of Sam Delany, Ursula Le Guin, David Mitchell, and …
We live in a world as hyper-capitalist as any point in history, with inequality approaching the extremes of Dickensian England circa 1850. Yet, consumers increasingly expect music, films and books to come free.
This is the problem faced by writers: …
“It’s fun for the children,” they tell me. “Harmless,” they say. “It gets the kids outside – don’t be such a killjoy,” they implore.
So if my opposition to Halloween makes me the Scrooge of that festival, then so be …
