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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'A celebration of insights from a luminairie of Australian letters.
'The first time around these pieces were not widely heard or read. A roomful of festival-goers in Sydney or Penang or Ballarat could well have heard me hold forth on the subject of Enid Blyton, say, or kissing, it’s true, and a few of my newspaper articles – my feuilletons, as I’m calling them – may have caught the eye of some readers of the Byron Shire Echo some years ago. It’s not that these audiences were unappreciative, but they were limited. Nowadays a podcast can attract an audience of tens of thousands around the globe, while I performed for the most part in more intimate spaces – these were entertainments, so to speak, for un-known friends.'
'No festival organiser, newspaper editor or publisher who has worked with Robert Dessaix is likely to have escaped a request for copies of his wonderful, fleeting talks and short works, or feuilletons.
'These ephemeral pieces — including an overlooked short story ('not my usual genre, but [it] is also a performance, after all, a turn, a numéro, about love’) — are the work of a conjurer whose words dazzle, then seem to vanish almost as soon as they arrive. They are collected, and often annotated, for the very first time in Abracadabra.
'From the wonder of learning foreign languages, to ‘the words I wished I’d said’, Abracadabra is brimming with the thoughtful, witty and humorous observations for which Dessaix is known, and proves, once again, that his way with words is equally magical on the stage as it is on the page.
'Part memoir and personal record, Abracadabra is a work many years in the making, an engrossing collection of observations and ideas which remind us why we read: for pleasure, after all.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Content indexing in process.
Contents
- How Enid Blyton Changed My Life, single work essay
- Writing Home : Thea Astley, single work prose
- Where Babies Come From, single work prose
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Pushing against the Dark,
single work
essay
Robert Dessaix expresses the view that 'the act of writing is an act of resistance against the mortal condition - not mortality, but the mortal condition, and not in the sense of winning the writer immortality of the clichéd kind ... but in the sense of deepening and magnifying the lived moment while writing'.
- Letter to My Collins Robert French Dictionary, single work prose
- Too Late, single work prose
- Hunger and Joy, single work prose
- Douleurs de L'ame, Douieurs Du Corps, single work prose
- Beauty, single work prose
- Kissing, Hugging and Saying I Love You, single work prose
- Kali's Whisper, single work prose
- What's in a Name, single work prose
- Dancing in Ladakh, single work prose
- Ooty, single work prose
- Venice and Vivaldi, single work prose
- Did You Have a Good Time, single work prose
- Frankly, My Dear, single work prose
- Thanks, but No Thanks, single work prose
- A Mad Affair, single work short story
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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The Magic of Dessaix's Abracadabra
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 17 April vol. 33 no. 7 2023;
— Review of Abracadabra : I've Said It Before and I'll Say It Again ... 2022 selected work prose autobiography'While our lives plod along in an ordinary groove, the great writers astound us and lift us on to another plane. The state of reading, Dessaix believes, is one of intense attention: in every true reading of literature in adult life, we revert to that early attitude of plasticity and innocence before the text.' (Introduction)
-
Robert Dessaix Abracadabra
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , June 2022;
— Review of Abracadabra : I've Said It Before and I'll Say It Again ... 2022 selected work prose autobiography'In his preface to these collected writings, Dessaix describes them as ‘talks of mine from gala occasions, along with a few chatty but targeted pieces of journalism … [plus] a short story’; on the back cover, he is quoted as calling his journal articles ‘feuilletons’. Before I began to read the book, I looked up the translation of ‘feuilletons’ – ‘soap operas’ was the first definition I came across.' (Introduction)
-
Robert Dessaix Abracadabra
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , June 2022;
— Review of Abracadabra : I've Said It Before and I'll Say It Again ... 2022 selected work prose autobiography'In his preface to these collected writings, Dessaix describes them as ‘talks of mine from gala occasions, along with a few chatty but targeted pieces of journalism … [plus] a short story’; on the back cover, he is quoted as calling his journal articles ‘feuilletons’. Before I began to read the book, I looked up the translation of ‘feuilletons’ – ‘soap operas’ was the first definition I came across.' (Introduction)
-
The Magic of Dessaix's Abracadabra
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 17 April vol. 33 no. 7 2023;
— Review of Abracadabra : I've Said It Before and I'll Say It Again ... 2022 selected work prose autobiography'While our lives plod along in an ordinary groove, the great writers astound us and lift us on to another plane. The state of reading, Dessaix believes, is one of intense attention: in every true reading of literature in adult life, we revert to that early attitude of plasticity and innocence before the text.' (Introduction)