Why does the publishing industry elevate white writers over #ownvoices writers when it comes to the experiences of communities of colour? It happens because books like American Dirt and Act of Grace fit comfortably with mainstream stereotypes, they don’t challenge white and Western readers to think and see First Nations people and people of colour in their depth and complexity. It happens because the sensationalist depiction of brutal violence and trauma in the Great White Novel sells. Both American Dirt and Act of Grace have plenty of stomach-turning scenes of gratuitous violence, rapes, and beatings. At a time when there is global concern about the plight facing refugees, migrant children being caged and separated from parents, the horrors of offshore detention and border walls, the publishing industry has peddled us these exploitative and cartoonish depictions that produce an easy empathy rather than forcing readers to reckon with their own positionality in structures of power, and the deeper problems that require action.

I started composing this review during the peak of the bushfires in January. I returned to complete it as the coronavirus pandemic settled into its critical phase. The globalising, unifying elements of such crises are palpable, and resonate with Hägglund’s focus on fragility as an ineliminable element of political effort, just as it is for life as such. And yet his universal philosophy betrays a startling parochialism in the way it apportions which routes of anti-capitalism are viable and which aren’t.

In certain respects, Davis is as quirky an essayist as she is a short-story writer. The greatest practitioners of the form – Hazlitt, Woolf, Orwell (choose your own) – tend to write in ways that seek to draw the reader into the movement of their thoughts. There is a sense of ideas and arguments being pursued on the page. Davis’ essays are interestingly unlike this. She does enliven them with the occasional autobiographical reminiscence; some of them even have the bones of a narrative structure. In an essay on the now little-read American writer Edward Dahlberg, for example, she undertakes an informal survey, asking every bookish person she meets their opinion of him. But her approach tends to be plainspoken and paratactic. There is often a sense that the thinking is already done and Davis is simply reporting her results, leaving readers to make of them what they will.

One billion animals don’t just die without retribution. Some strong message was saying that were doing things all the way wrong and that a shelter-in-place could provide some food for thought on what we could do next.

Lately, I have been asking myself why it is that Black Feminist study is so central to my understanding of how to live a political life. Why, as a Brown settler also shaped by colonialism and living on Indigenous land in the place often referred to as Australia, do I find myself reading and re-reading Saidiya Hartman’s work? What is it that Black study offers?

It is in the worlds of design and architecture that the word Bauhaus is most familiar today. Bauhaus is sometimes taken as a synonym for ‘Modern’. The contribution of the Bauhäuslers and their lesser known colleagues in Australia – Elenore Lange, Dahl Collings and David Foulkes Taylor – and in New Zealand – Ernst Plischke, Heinrich Kulka and Vladimir Čačala – stands as testament to a not yet sufficiently well-known dimension of the art and design histories of those two countries. For too long those histories have been introverted and, in aspiration, excessively nationalistic.

How can we tell the story of places where families with limited means came and went and made a living of sorts, places that act as meeting points between the old and the new, the long established and the newly arrived, where each generation is given the opportunity to understand itself as different from a previous generation and, hence, able to break away?

Reading and writing are bodies within bodies and rooms within each other. Fitch’s poetry is exemplary in terms of showing us the possibilities – and impossibilities (like reading in a dark room, like being in spaces we aren’t) – of the reading/writing (or pretext/text) relation. But there is no separate room or compartment where we house our reading: writing brings back all kinds of memories of mental and affective experience, including those involving digital forms, and material art.

Night Games is not simply an exploration of a particular case. It lays bare football’s problematic sexual culture, which treats women as objects for men’s sexual use. It also highlights flaws within the legal processes that are in place to deal with rape cases. In a non-judgemental and engaging style, Krien presents her book as a consideration of the wider issues of rape, sex, sport and law.

Did the student say the Outline trilogy was rendered mostly in indirect speech? Perhaps that is why – to quiver between the untruth of getting it all down and the truth of not getting it down in the right words.

Lisa Gorton’s new collection Empirical translates the notion of charismatic megafauna, which may be seen alongside more lyrical creatures at the Melbourne Zoo…, into that of charismatic megapoems.

Josephine Rowe’s stories are about time. Time as it is lived and as it is recounted; the way it doesn’t just progress, but speeds and slows, persists and lingers.

There have been, in recent years, many attempts to explain when a novel makes the definitional leap from ‘fiction’ to ‘autofiction’. It has turned out to be a difficult task. Writers of autofiction write about their lives, but then so do many authors who escape the label.

Nothing Maddison recounts is necessarily wrong – but this is a book whose readership is either blak and knows the contents intimately, or is a particular kind of white for whom this is intellectual tourism into our alleged dysfunction.

The sense that there exists a gap between language and the world is the theme to which Ben Lerner’s writing has most relentlessly returned.

I began to imagine the landscape of Byron Bay, so as to rehearse in advance the pitfalls awaiting. For a setting: the vague image of a beach somewhere: a bright sun and a long curving beach populated by tourists in shorts and thongs, the air stinking of seaweed and sunscreen, a hot burning sensation spread across my cheeks and sand between my toes. High to the right, I saw a limestone lighthouse on a hill, and seagulls rising to a background of clouds. This seemed a suitable conception of a beachside paradiso, one likely to fit some part of the bay’s picture. A memory intervened in this idyll: I remembered what it should not be possible to forget: for a while, at least, I was a married man, and had honeymooned deep in the forests of the riverlands of northern New South Wales, stopping and staying in Byron on the way there.

In Street to Street, Brian Castro resurrects Christopher Brennan in all his defensive, creative brilliance and personal and professional failure.