Gerard Elson
Gerard Elson is from Readings St Kilda
Review — 21 Oct 2019
Ghosteen by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
It’s a fact that has been little remarked upon across his forty-year career, but Nick Cave is a master of reinvention. The Bad Seeds – now on their seventeenth studio…
Review — 29 Jul 2012
The Two Frank Thrings by Peter Fitzpatrick
The rise of commercial cinema in Australia and the nascence of our independent film industry provide a fascinating backdrop to this meticulous academic biography of the two Frank Thrings, father…
Blog post — 14 Nov 2017
Gerard Elson on the importance of The Damage Report
You have to admit, it’s a crazy idea.
Beginning February 25, 2016, Zo Damage, Melburnian gig photographer extraordinaire, would photograph at least one live band per calendar entry over the…
Review — 22 Aug 2016
Grant & I by Robert Forster
As Robert Forster tells it near the end of his affecting, up-tempo memoir, the decision to write Grant & I was not his. The morning after his death by heart…
Review — 23 Feb 2015
Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Cards on the table: at time of writing I haven’t yet finished this, the fourth volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘autobiographical novel’ cycle. In his almost punishingly expansive style previous…
Blog post — 17 May 2015
Gerard Elson wins Young Bookseller of the Year
St Kilda staff member Gerard Elson was named Young Bookseller of the Year at the 2015 ABA Conference last night. We’re enormously proud.
Here, he tells us his favourite books…
Blog post — 9 Feb 2015
Choose your own adventure: the John Darnielle edition
MOVE 1.
Summer, St Kilda. Strolling Acland Street, you dispose of your empty frozen yoghurt cup and peel off into Readings Books. The store’s cool interior is a welcome respite…
Review — 24 Nov 2014
Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec
The works of the late Georges Perec are as difficult as they are sundry. Portrait of a Man was written several years before Perec’s first published novel, Things, a…
Review — 23 Sep 2014
10:04 by Ben Lerner
Every moment is charged with illimitable potential in Ben Lerner’s great second novel, and every action pregnant, however involuntarily, with the played narratives of both history and personal past. As…
Blog post — 8 Apr 2014
Shame in Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series
Last week saw the release of Boyhood Island, the third volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, and over the weekend the Guardian published a piece by Hari…