He is the world’s greatest film director. His characters, his scenery, his costumes―all are authentic, zestful, artistic, artful.But nobody knows he is the world’s greatest film director. Maybe nobody ever will. For all of his masterpieces are stored in an impregnable canister: the head of the film-maker. Inside his brain, nestling safely, reel upon reel of film, magnificently photographed, brilliantly edited, not a frame of it accessible to the viewing public.An Unusual Angle is about the making of this great film. It is also the film itself. Here is a blazing epic of stupendous events: four years of an ordinary Australian secondary school. Few would have suspected before that an ‘ordinary’ school could provide the material of rich humour, zany lunacy and near tragedy.Greg Egan was born in Perth in 1961. He was educated at the University of Western Australia. He has worked for mercifully brief periods as a kitchen hand, a milk-vendor’s runner, and as a public servant. Meanwhile, his real efforts have been directed towards writing novels and short stories (four novels and a book of short stories written so far) and making amateur films (a 65-minute, 16 mm film completed recently).

He is the world’s greatest film director. His characters, his scenery, his costumes―all are authentic, zestful, artistic, artful. But nobody knows he is the world’s greatest film director. Maybe nobody ever will. For all of his masterpieces are stored in an impregnable canister: the head of the film-maker. Inside his brain, nestling safely, reel upon reel of film, magnificently photographed, brilliantly edited, not a frame of it accessible to the viewing public. An Unusual Angle is about the making of this great film. It is also the film itself. Here is a blazing epic of stupendous events: four years of an ordinary Australian secondary school. Few would have suspected before that an ‘ordinary’ school could provide the material of rich humour, zany lunacy and near tragedy. Greg Egan was born in Perth in 1961. He was educated at the University of Western Australia. He has worked for mercifully brief periods as a kitchen hand, a milk-vendor’s runner, and as a public servant. Meanwhile, his real efforts have been directed towards writing novels and short stories (four novels and a book of short stories written so far) and making amateur films (a 65-minute, 16 mm film completed recently).

Spanning over thirty years of writing, Dispatches and Diversions is a wonderful collection of articles that cross the globe and introduce readers to many characters, introduced as only Bill Barich can. As said by Time magazine, Barich's touch is always “artful and compassionate."Broken up into two sections, Barich shares stories of the people, from those that have shaken him to the core, to others from a much lighter place.As he notes in his introduction, “I've spent much of my writing life indulging curiosity, throwing myself into situations and subcultures to gain an education and acquire my own angle on the world. The dispatches collected here arose from that desire."From the troubles in Northern Ireland and the homeless in San Francisco to the US-Mexico borders, Barich went to the people to find the “real story. These are his dispatches. “They all explore stories the press had ignored or covered in a desultory way, at least in...