There is this often-quoted adage about internet comment sections, probably you’ve heard it. It’s called Godwin’s Law and it predicts…

Hard Joy widens the lens, looking back across the span of seventy years to consider those fundamental human questions of what makes us, and who makes us.

Summertime makes plain what we ought not need to be told: we are already living in the dreaded future, and that this dreaded future already forms part of our past.

The first mystery concerns Koike, a 37-year-old bank employee. Why did he keep a diary of his internment, when most others did not?

When it comes to access, everyone is becoming ~Radical~ these days. I’ve noticed

… King Lear in quarantine, I found myself thinking, trying to ignore the fridge and keep an eye on the younger child building Lego structures and smashing them, trying to make notes on my phone for that article about reading in quarantine, reminding myself to finish another essay about libraries, trying to imagine how it would make sense now that all the libraries were closed.

There is something about weaving, creative nonfiction writing, and, I will say this last – coding – that overlap with each other. Sometimes when I’m coding, the way I pay attention to some of these lines of code, it really reminds me of sitting at the loom and trying to figure things out. Like, I see something in my head, and I’m just trying to make it happen on my screen.

Sydney Review of Books has been online for almost ten years. We need your support to help us into the next decade.

The lives of writers are a topic of perennial fascination to readers – and indeed to other writers. And yet the writer at work is often a mythologised figure, distant from the cares of the day. In Open Secrets Australian writers reflect upon the material conditions that give rise to their writing practice.

Living at the centre of European politics for ten years, on the knife edge between the medieval and early modern, Thomas Cromwell may have been able to envision a better age to come. A reader of this bruising, brilliant sequence of novels might now be a little more sceptical. The arc of the moral universe is long in Mantel’s trilogy, but it bends more towards irony than justice.

When the regulars spoke of it, they agreed that Three Ropes was like a set. A character struts in, speaks a few lines over coffee and then leaves at their appointed time, as summed up by Macbeth.

Stanišić’s books play with time as much as they play with fantasy, which are more entangled than one might suspect, but perhaps understandably so for someone like Stanišić, or someone like me, that is to say: children born into Yugoslavia and made refugees by the genocidal war that followed its fracturing.

By some cosmic sophomoric prank, despite my desire to become what some people call a writer, my true occupation on this earth has always been and always will be captured by the construction ‘a car-man is a car-man is a car-man is a car-man’, and if that formulation makes your skin crawl, try telling me about it, since the only escape from this fate of mine is the one Henry Lawson recommended above, and that salvation is forbidden by religion.

The legal professionals in Witness reminded me of one of the lessons I internalised in my very first class at law school: working within the legal system ­– as a ‘professional’ – requires you to push subjectivity to the side.