Cathy Chua is currently based in Europe and Australia. Her academic background is in history and politics and she’s had a long involvement in book publishing, as well as in the antiquarian book business. She’s written four books, many articles, and keeps various blogs. She has played bridge and chess at world championship level and dabbles in knitting and cooking. Despite the efforts of those around her, she has remained stubbornly monolingual. Reading is a passion, collecting books a habit since childhood. Email: cathyc [at] pioneerbooks.com.au
by Cathy Chua Earlier this year one of the encounters technology has made available for mind games took place – the 2019 Junior Speed Chess Championship. The technology is impressive, with the board, and video commentary by two masters, along with video of the players. Smirnov, the Australian number one player was outranked by his…
by Cathy Chua Shortly before my first trip to Austria in September, a story did the rounds of a tourist sued for leaving a review on Tripadvisor complaining of a photographic display of Nazis at a hotel in a little town called Gerlos in the Tyrolean Alps. The case has not yet ended, but for now…
by Cathy Chua A while ago findingtimetowrite wrote a post about underrated writers as she saw them. She started off with Patricia Highsmith and I must agree, she is vastly underrated. I don’t know that it’s gender related so much as because she writes ‘crime’ which has for so long been judged as ‘genre’. Designation as denigration.…
by Cathy Chua Ambrose finds out he has only weeks to live. How to spend that time is the premise of The End of the Alphabet (2007). It’s a condensed weepie in which Ambrose decides to visit a series of places with his wife that will take them through the alphabet. Somehow Richardson manages to…
by Cathy Chua In that famous speech where Leonard Cohen told us ‘…never to lament casually’, he continued ‘And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.’ When I’m in Geneva I often go to the large flea…