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James Ley James Ley i(A70104 works by)
Born: Established: 1971 Whyalla, Whyalla area, Northern Eyre Peninsula, Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, ;
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 Expert Textpert James Ley , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Critic Swallows Book : Ten Years of the Sydney Review of Books 2023;
1 y separately published work icon J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K at Forty James Ley , Southbank : Australian Book Review, Inc. , 2023 26766125 2023 single work podcast

'On this week’s ABR podcast, critic and essayist James Ley reflects on J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, forty years after its publication. Coetzee’s fourth and Booker Prize-winning novel was his landmark work, explains Ley. This was despite it receiving criticism for supposedly eliding the political realities of Apartheid South Africa by being set in ‘the realm of allegory’. Listen to James Ley with ‘An obscure prodigy: J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K at forty’, published in the August issue of ABR.'

1 An Obscure Prodigy J.M. Coetzee’s 'Life and Times of Michael K' at Forty James Ley , 2023 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 456 2023; (p. 50)

'These are the words of Mrs Curren, the elderly narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s under-appreciated mid-period novel Age of Iron (1990), but it would be easy enough to find similarly anguished sentiments being expressed by the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), or Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg (1994), or David Lurie in Disgrace (1996), or the eponymous protagonist of Elizabeth Costello (2003). It has long been apparent that there is a recognisable Coetzeean type, who appears in various guises in his many novels. These characters tend to be educated products of their relatively privileged social positions. They are conscious of the pain and injustice in the world, conscious of their own suffering, and conscious of their impotence in the face of overmastering contexts. Their common instinct is to philosophise about these problems. Many ironies, gruelling and subtle, arise from their desire for redemption and their simultaneous awareness of its impossibility, not least of which is that their penchant for metaphysical high-mindedness has a distinct tendency – on display in Mrs Curren’s lament – to bend back on itself in a way that resembles self-absorption or even self-pity.' (Introduction)

1 Trapped in Negation James Ley , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: Open Secrets : Essays on the Writing Life 2022;
1 City Mouse, Country Mouse James Ley , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , December 2022;

— Review of My Father and Other Animals : How I Took on the Family Farm Sam Vincent , 2022 single work autobiography ; Growing Up in Country Australia 2022 anthology autobiography
1 Lest We Remember James Ley , 2022 single work biography
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , February 2022;

'The first sentence in John Hughes’ novel The Dogs is lifted from his first book, a collection of autobiographical essays titled The Idea of Home (2004), though the recycled line is not quite verbatim.'  (Introduction)

1 A Rising Scream : An Essay on the Metaphysics of Love James Ley , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 426 2020; (p. 28-29)

— Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams Richard Flanagan , 2020 single work novel

'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams begins, self-consciously, at the limits of language. Its opening pages are rendered in a prose style that is fragmented and contorted. Sentences break down, run into each other. Syntax is twisted into odd shapes that call into question the very possibility of meaning. Words seem to arrive pre-estranged by semantic satiation in a way that evokes Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett at their most opaque: ‘As if they too were already then falling apart, so much ash and soot soon to fall, so much smoke to suck down. As if all that can be said is we say you and if that then. Them us were we you?’' (Introduction)

1 Millenarian Pastoral James Ley , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2020;

— Review of The Rain Heron Robbie Arnott , 2020 single work novel
'If reality can be said to have a genre, that genre is not realism. Reality is dystopian. It is an outlandish disaster movie. It is a sadistic horror story, a terrifying nightmare, a surreal farrago, an appalling farce. It is a poorly written conspiracy thriller, in which the world is run by evil nincompoops who are so smug and lazy they can’t be bothered hiding their corruption. It is like living through Nineteen Eighty-Four and Endgame and Soylent Green all at once, except everyone is trapped in a clown car being driven over a cliff. Reality is many things, but it is not realistic.'
1 A Curse on Art, A Curse on Society : Government Contempt for the ABC, The Arts, and the Academy James Ley , 2020 single work column
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 423 2020; (p. 22-23)
'It is curious the way certain books can insinuate themselves into your consciousness. I am not necessarily talking about favourite books, or formative ones that evoke a particular time and place, but those stray books that seem to have been acquired almost inadvertently (all bibliophiles possess such volumes, I'm sure), and taken up without any particular expectations, books that have something intriguing about them that keeps drawing you back.' (Introduction)
1 Don’t Call Me I’ll Call You, Ishmael James Ley , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , July 2020;
Reviews Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs
1 y separately published work icon Unsolicited Smut : A Nation of Prudes and Wowsers James Ley Reviews 'The Trials of Portnoy' by Patrick Mullins James Ley , Southbank : Australian Book Review, Inc. , 2020 19498503 2020 single work review
— Review of The Trials of Portnoy : How Penguin Brought down Australia's Censorship System Patrick Mullins , 2020 single work criticism
'Okay, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this country. For a start, we have this profoundly stupid and deeply irritating myth that we’re all irreverent freedom-loving larrikins and easygoing egalitarians, when it is painfully obvious that we have long been a nation of prudes and wowsers, that our collective psyche has been warped by what Patrick Mullins describes, with his characteristic lucidity, as ‘a fear of contaminating international influences’, and that we are not just an insular, conservative, and deeply conformist society, but for some unaccountable reason we take pride in our ignorance and parochialism. And let’s not neglect the fact that we are cringingly deferential and enamoured of hierarchy...' (Introduction)
1 Introduction James Ley , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Summertime : Scenes from Provincial Life 2020;
1 All Is Vanity : The Rich Man’s House by Andrew McGahan James Ley , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , November 2019;

— Review of The Rich Man's House Andrew McGahan , 2019 single work novel

'Andrew McGahan’s first novel Praise (1992) was one of those books that captured the mood of its time and place. More than any other Australian novel of the early 1990s, it found a way to express the peculiar sense of disaffection and uncertainty inherited by those of us who just happened to come of age at the tail end of two decades of social and economic transformation, at the very moment an exhausted nation slumped into a recession. Its depiction of the seedy urban existence of its narrator Gordon Buchanan was greeted with a fusillade of clichéd adjectives (gritty, unflinching, confronting, and so forth) and hailed as a contribution to a confected genre that an especially witless hack decided to call ‘grunge’ — a literary movement notable for the fact that no one wanted to belong to it, least of all McGahan. But the significant aspect of all the sex and drinking and drug-taking described in the pages of Praise was that they were so ordinary. There was nothing edgy or rebellious or liberating or hedonistic about them; they were simply part of the texture of reality, commonplace activities that lacked even the residual glamour of decadence. They evoked a drab world of foreclosed possibilities, a world in which both the tattered countercultural ethos of the 1960s and the fluorescent crapulence of the 1980s had been exposed as empty promises. The passive cycle of drinking and drugging was presented as a numbing routine, a mundane way to pass the time while surveying a prospectless horizon. Sex was depicted with an emphasis on its unerotic complications: premature ejaculation, venereal disease, unwanted pregnancy, mismatched desires, a general sense of awkwardness and embarrassment.' (Introduction)

1 The Boy Pulled through at Last James Ley , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 9 March 2019; (p. 20)

— Review of A Season on Earth Gerald Murnane , 2019 single work novel

'Gerald Murnane’s old/new novel puts him in the company of James Joyce, writes James Ley'  (Introduction)

1 An Attenuated Life : Stripping a Quasi-religious Tale Back to Its Essence James Ley , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 415 2019; (p. 42-43)

'It is commonly accepted that the modern European novel begins with Don Quixote. Lionel Trilling went so far as to claim that the entire history of the modern novel could be interpreted as variations on themes set out in Cervantes’s great originating work. And the quality that is usually taken to mark Don Quixote as ‘modern’ is its irony. It is a fiction about fiction. The new sensibility it inaugurated begins in a spirit of mockery, ridiculing the obsolete genre of chivalric romance, insisting on the disconnection between reality and fantasy. As a character observes in The Childhood of Jesus (2013), the first novel in J.M. Coetzee’s trilogy about a precocious orphan named David and his accidental guardian, Simón, the innovation of Don Quixote is to view the world through two sets of eyes: where Quixote sees giants, his loyal sidekick, Sancho Panza, sees only windmills.' (Introduction)

1 The Drug of Otherness : The Returns by Philip Salom James Ley , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , July 2019;

'Philip Salom’s fourth novel The Returns is the story of two middle-aged characters: Elizabeth and Trevor. Elizabeth is an editor whose in-house career stalled when she had the temerity to suggest a manuscript by a famous author might require substantial revision. Now she muddles along as a freelancer. Trevor was an aspiring artist, but has come to spend most of his time idling behind the counter of his sleepy North Melbourne bookshop. They meet one day when Elizabeth nearly faints out the front of Trevor’s shop and he comes to her aid. She subsequently asks him to place a notice in his window advertising the spare room she is hoping to rent out. Trevor’s marriage is ending — not acrimoniously, things just seem to have run their course — so he applies to become Elizabeth’s lodger, lured by the opportunity this affords to convert the disused shed in her backyard into a studio and rekindle his artistic practice.'  (Introduction)

1 Father Man James Ley , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 409 2019; (p. 25)

'The term ‘exploded view’ refers to an image in a technical manual that shows all the individual parts of a machine, separates them out, but arranges them on the page so that you can see how they fit together. As the title of Carrie Tiffany’s new novel, it can be interpreted as a definitive metaphor and perhaps, in a somewhat looser sense, an analogy for her evocative technique. Various things happen over the course of Exploded View, some of them dramatic, but the novel has little in the way of a conventional plot. Its characters exist in relation to one another, but they barely interact. There is almost no dialogue. It is the kind of novel in which the psychological and emotional unease is displaced or buried beneath the matter-of-fact narration.' (Introduction)

1 I’m with Stupid : The Lebs by Michael Mohammed Ahmad James Ley , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , May 2018;

'In November 2016, Michael Mohammed Ahmad published an essay in the Sydney Review of Books titled ‘Lebs and Punchbowl Prison’. The ‘prison’ in question was his alma mater, Punchbowl Boys High School, and the essay was a reflection on his time as a student there in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the time, the school was not exactly regarded as a hub of academic excellence, a perception that Ahmad does nothing to dispel. His recollections are a litany of educational dysfunction and outrageous misbehaviour, ranging from adolescent hijinks to acts of violence.' (Introduction)

1 Introduction James Ley , Catriona Menzies-Pike , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: The Australian Face : Essays from the Sydney Review of Books 2017; (p. 1-2)

'Sydney Review of Books was established in January 2013 with the aim of creating an online forum where Australia's critics could write at length about literature and cultural issues. The journal is now into its fifth year of existence, during which time it has published more than five hundred essays on Australian and international literature and culture. These essays have been widely circulated and discussed; several have been anthologised or translated; some of them have been controversial. But this is the first collection of Sydney Review of Books essays to appear in book form, and we offer it as a small but representative sample of the essays we have been proud to publish over the past five years.'  (Introduction)

1 Fictive Selves: The Life to Come James Ley , 2017 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , December 2017;

— Review of The Life to Come Michelle De Kretser , 2017 single work novel

'Near the end of Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, an elderly woman named Christabel throws two novels she has been reading into the bin. One of them is by a writer named George Meshaw, whose work ‘concerned itself with the brutal and inadequate mechanism of the world. As if that were any kind of news!’ The other is by Pippa Reynolds, a contemporary version of the ‘silly lady novelist’ who once attracted the withering disapproval of George Eliot.' (Introduction)

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