Joanna Di Mattia
Joanna Di Mattia is from Readings Carlton
Blog post — 8 Dec 2023
Bookseller spotlight: Joanna Di Mattia’s favourite books of 2023
Joanna Di Mattia is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
I made an early declaration this year that Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos would be the best novel I’d read in 2023, and…
Review — 31 Jul 2023
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin
When I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I took a course in women’s art history that ran over multiple semesters and offered a historical survey. I encountered art…
Review — 31 Jul 2023
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck & Michael Hofmann (trans.)
The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fourth novel refers to a tenet of ancient Greek philosophy – the idea of the right or critical moment to act. Just how kairos impacts…
Review — 3 Jul 2023
George: A Magpie Memoir by Frieda Hughes
I’ll confess I wanted to review this memoir, in part, because of a prying curiosity. What might the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes reveal to me about her…
Review — 3 Jul 2023
Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life by Amy Key
What if being single isn’t a transient state? Is a life without romantic love necessarily intolerable? These are just two of the tough, weighty questions from which Amy Key’s introspective…
Review — 20 Apr 2023
August Blue by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy’s new novel unfolds like a dream – surreal, beguiling, enigmatic. As with most of Levy’s work, it creates a singular world, influenced by Duras and de Beauvoir and…
Review — 27 Mar 2023
Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas
Madelaine Lucas’s gorgeous debut opens with her unnamed narrator’s discovery of a photo of a man with a little girl: his daughter. She recognises him – Jude, older now than…
Review — 28 Jun 2021
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.’ A great opening line: nervous, brittle, crackling…
Review — 30 Aug 2022
This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham
Leonard Woolf – writer, publisher, colonialist, gardener, animal lover, and husband of Virginia – called his personal battle between desire and repression ‘this devastating fever’. Leonard is a major protagonist…
Review — 28 Jul 2022
Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City by Melbourne International Film Festival
Cities are central to the history of cinema. New York. Paris. London. Hong Kong. All cities with an identifiable, iconic visual language. Cities are both setting and subject. It’s not…
