Madewell's FW 2014

  
It's really cooling down fast in Brisbane at the moment. My house in particular seems to be a few degrees below the outdoors (a side effect of swollen window frames and raised floors) which tends to be a relief in summer, but isn't quite so pleasant in winter. As a result, I'm unpacking winter clothes and eyeing off pretty stuff. Pretty stuff, this week, being Madewell's awesome FW14 collection. I love the combinations of knits and parkers, scattered with winter grays and spring brights. I feel pretty toasty even looking at them.

You can check out the full collection over at Fashionista.com.

  

  

  

  

  

    

  

Sunday Short: Sarah and the Seed by Ryan Andrews

I'm pretty partial to short, one-shot comics. I think it often allows a level of fantasy you'd have to over explain in a longer work. The medium and length instead allows you to let go of reality a little while and invited you to just go with it. Sarah and the Seed is particularly lovely. A small, simple story of a woman's desperation for a family, wonderfully told.

You can read Sarah and the Seed over at Ryan Andrews website here.

Friday Finds

This is basically my favourite thing of the week.

- This new study on slut shaming as a class issue, not a sexuality one is both awful and really interesting.

- On a more positive note, a brief history of female comedies!

- To say I'm pretty darn excited for the Studio Ghibli documentary, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, is a pretty big understatement.

- Also pretty darn excited for Gotham, particularly with this early buzz! And this teaser!

- This retro-themed, Batman engagement shoot is totally charming.

- 29 times tumblr raised serious questions about Harry Potter is super, super great too.

Gorman: Never Smile at a Crocodile FW14

Gorman is one of my favourite Australian designers. They're use of colour and print and hard lines below soft just does things to me. Their FW14 collection, Never Smile at a Crocodile, is particularly great. There's not an outfit here I wouldn't wear and I'd basically kill for that cactus print dress.

You can view the full collection here.  

 

'The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing' by Melissa Bank (22/52)

Jane is fourteen, twenty, thirty and older in this collection of snapshots by Melissa Bank. She's a friend, a lover, a daughter, a sister. An observer, an editor, a reader, a carer. This series of moments are the making and unmaking of Jane, told through her job and her relationships.

There's been a real wave of fiction in recent years that have been part novel, part collection, and when it's done well, it is so great. This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz is a great example of the form, and so's this one. Bank tells a series of compelling stories that centre around Jane, an uncertain, certain girl, then woman, who comes of age over and over again. Bank knows her inside out, which helps in fleshing out a character who could potentially come off as irritating or shallow in a lesser writer's hands. As it is though, Jane make good choices and bad ones, but the reader always ultimately understands them. It's a pretty great effect.

4 out of 5 Henry girlfriends.

Sunday Short: 'The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine' by Melissa Bank

I asked him to tell me the truth about drinking, and he did.    He'd been drinking all along. He told me all the times he could remember. I went back over each one. Then I asked about other times when I'd sensed something was wrong, and went back over the years to the first time--when I'd gone over his house to tell him that Jamie and I had broken up.    This was how I'd felt finding out about my father; it was like getting the subtitles after the movie.    Archie tried to reassure me. He told me that he was not drinking now, and he swore to me that he wouldn't again. He took Antabuse and kept the poker chip in his pocket. But these had failed him before--or he'd failed them. He would drink again, I knew that. It was part of who he was.

I finished Melissa Bank's novel (collection?) 'The Girls' Guide to Hunting & Fishing' this morning, and this was really one of the stand-out story's in it, so I was glad to find it on Zoetrope to be able to link to it. It's a moving portrayal of death and romance, familial love and desperate love and love running out. Bank's writing style is simultaneously distant and intimate, giving you the sort of dull ache that only pretty special writing can. It's lovely, and awful, and a pretty wonderful novelette.

You can read 'The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine' by Melissa Bank over at Zoetrope.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Anonymous (Nikki Gemmell) (21/52)

After discovering her husband's affair with her best friend on their honeymoon, The Bride Stripped Bare's unnamed protagonist begins a journey of sexual exploration with a bullfighter, Gabriel. Told in lessons inspired by a book her grandfather owned, this novel is part character study, part kink study and part unravelling.

I was late to the party on this one. It came out back in 2003, and I still remember the media circus that surrounded it. Released as an anonymous work, a journalist managed to worm out the real author, Nikki Gemmell, before the thing even hit the stands, turning an intriguing could-be-true work into a high-profile fiction novel. It's both a good and bad thing, to read it so much later, I think. Gemmell is doubtlessly a good writer, and her exploration of her heavily flawed protagonist's sexuality makes for an interesting, and often complex, novel. The way the relationships play out too is not always what you expect, and that works as often as it doesn't.

I liked Gabriel. I liked that we never entirely knew him, and that he was as honest as he was dishonest. Similarly, Theo, Cole and the protagonist's mother were all compelling. Even if I didn't like them, I was engaged with their stories, which is a nice way to read a novel. That said, I don't entirely understand why the protagonist and Cole stayed together. She was clearly so devastated after the reveal, and her complete erasure of Theo from her life could have sensibly applied back to Cole. I also struggled with the protagonist's wallowing. It wasn't always bad, but she was such a passive character, and her refusal to take accountability for her actions seemed out of tune with the speed in which she cast judgement on others. Those things aren't necessarily separate; however, it left a bit of an unpleasant taste when we spent a lot of time solely with her, and not with the others for her to bounce off. She was an interesting lead, but not a particularly likable one.

3 out of 5 Elizabethan sex books.