Jackie Tang
Jackie Tang is a former editor of Readings Monthly
Review — 31 Oct 2021
Seven and a Half by Christos Tsiolkas
It’s been too long since we last felt the excitement of a new Christos Tsiolkas novel. Exactly two years in fact since his award-wining epic Damascus was released in November…
Review — 2 Aug 2021
Muddy People: A Memoir by Sara El Sayed
Muddy People is the warm and welcoming debut memoir from Egyptian-born Brisbane-based writer Sara El Sayed. As vividly realised as the book’s enticing cover, El Sayed’s stories centre on her…
Review — 5 Aug 2021
The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements & Onjuli Datta
Never mind the view, this whole misbegotten year has been exhausting. I don’t know about you but lockdown after lockdown has scrambled my hidden wiring into a truly cursed tangle…
Review — 6 Sep 2021
Lies, Damned Lies by Claire G. Coleman
Noongar writer Claire G. Coleman blazed onto the local literary scene like a comet with her debut novel Terra Nullius in 2017. With its ingenious blend of historical and speculative…
Review — 1 Jun 2021
One Hundred Days by Alice Pung
High up in the housing commission tower, headstrong 16-year-old Karuna lives alone with her mother. Karuna feels suffocated by her mother’s strict rules and overbearing protectiveness – ‘a girl who…
Blog post — 2 Mar 2021
Dear Reader, with Jackie Tang
It’s a shorter column this month and the books are too good for me to waffle on with an introduction, so I will get straight to it, starting with Fiction…
Review — 28 Mar 2021
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
A traveller takes a drink with a melancholy monkeyworking in a run-down inn. A writer stumbles across a fictitious jazz record he made up for an old review as a…
Review — 2 Mar 2021
Friends and Dark Shapes by Kavita Bedford
In Kavita Bedford’s quietly hypnotic debut, an unnamed narrator in her late 20s roams the suburbs of Sydney trying to process her grief. A freelance writer, she lives in a…
Blog post — 16 Dec 2020
My five favourite reads of 2020
Our incoming Readings Monthly editor Jackie Tang shares five of her favourite books from the past year, including poetry, memoir, essays, short stories and YA!
Forgotten Corners by Pete Hay
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Review — 26 Mar 2019
The Place on Dalhousie by Melina Marchetta
A generation has grown up with Melina Marchetta’s writing since she debuted with her impeccable young adult novel Looking for Alibrandi in 1992. As one of that generation, it’s a…
