Chihuahuas, Women and Me

Known primarily as a dramatist and screenwriter, Louis Nowra is also a provocative and stylish essayist, displaying the same fascination with the unpredicable aspects of human behaviour that we associate with his plays. In Chihuahuas, Women and Me his subjects range from porn star Christy Canyon to French author and statesman Chateaubriand, from the antics of the tiny chihuahua to the paranoid and surreal logic of Russian life. There are two essays devoted to writing for theatre and film; and to conclude, an account of Nowra's huge repository of stories, culled from newspapers and magazines, and pasted into his 21,000-pages of scrapbooks.