Tag: Jonathan Franzen

Christina Stead in America

SoutherlyBlog

by Fiona McFarlane Christina Stead was born in Rockdale, Sydney, in 1902. Rockdale is a few stations along the Illawarra line from Hurstville, the railway station closest to my parents’ house, and I traveled through it every day as I went to and from high school. Stead sailed from Sydney to England in 1928, moved to the USA in 1937, then back to England, back to America, back to England (where her husband died), and finally, after an absence of forty-one years, returned to Sydney, where she lived in a flat above her brother’s house in Hurstville. She died in…

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What’s my name?

SoutherlyBlog

by Sunil Badami When I was younger, I was so thrilled by the idea of seeing my by-line in print, nothing else mattered. As I’ve gotten older, how I wish I’d had the foresight, like my idol, Eric Blair, to get a pen name! Why, especially in this age of celebrity, where children’s greatest ambition now seems not to be a doctor or even an actor, but just to be, like the Kardashians, simply famous, would I want a pen name? Not even actors bother with stage names now. Pseudonyms have existed as long as literature has: what other vocation…

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