A few years ago, I met up with my friend Michael Reynolds, editor-in-chief of Europa Editions and publisher of such global luminaries as Elena Ferrante and Mieko Kawakami, at a bar in our Brooklyn neighborhood. I was working on a piece about Richard Flanagan, the Booker Prize-winning Tasmanian author. Over Negronis, Michael, an Australian expat, mentioned that a Flanagan reading was the first time he’d heard a musicality in the Australian accent and argot: those cadences and “looooong” vowels and double-diphthongs. His pulse raced and his eyes welled with tears.
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