Michelle de Kretser : Theory & Practice

Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

Today’s guest, one of Australia’s most celebrated and daring writers, Michelle de Kretser, discusses her latest uncategorizable book Theory & Practice (one she describes as 80% fiction, 15% essay and 5% memoir). Theory & Practice is a book that is wildly erudite and erotic at the same time, both an engrossing, immersive read and one that is constantly experimenting with and breaking form. A book that dwells in the contradictions between what we believe and what we do. And one that uses, as a lens, the liberatory power of Virginia Woolf’s published words alongside her often snobbish, racist, and antisemitic private ones, not only to explore this contradiction but also questions of gender, race, class and colonialism more broadly. You’d be just as correct, however, to call it a book about love, sex, shame and jealousy, set on a university campus in the 1980s at the height of deconstruction’s hold on the minds of its thinkers there.

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Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation with books from everyone from Ursula K. Le Guin to Shirley Hazzard to Virginia Woolf.

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