Anwen Crawford’s remarkable new work of non-fiction, No Document, is many kinds of document, but one of the ways it can be read is as an attempt to discover a form of writing fit for ephemeral art practices – especially as those practices relate to, or become bound up with, experiences of vulnerability, pain, and mortality.

Just as certain weather conditions must be present for a rainbow to be visible, so the environment has to be right for literary titles from Aotearoa to be seen and noticed in Australia.

I am supposed to be writing this essay, ostensibly on technology, but the rooms of the house become a labyrinth, a game of snakes and ladders, a ten thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in which I am apt to forget my task or purpose.

Poems speak to us through panic and fences, closed doors, forests, rivers and distanced days. Their atoms lodge somewhere within us and we carry them close, hoping that, in the inferno of loss and uncertainty, the intensity and ambiguity of poetry can salvage something.

Mark Mordue’s compelling biography asserts that Nick Cave’s self-mythology is a product of both genuine artistic obsessions, and of the networks of friends and family uniquely equipped to guide and nurture them.

James Joyce once famously said that if it took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, then a reader should take seventeen years to read it. In his usual prophetic way, he turned out to be exactly right.

Join us on zoom at 11am on Friday 21 May for an online discussion between Eugen Bacon, Tamryn Bennett, David Carlin and Julienne van Loon on literary value, chaired by SRB’s editor, Catriona Menzies-Pike.

This seminar addresses the changing nature of literary value in 2021, against a movable backdrop of post-COVID Australia. It shares diverse findings from a collaborative project between the Sydney Review of Books and the non/fictionLab at RMIT University in Melbourne. The collaboration seeks to elicit experimental, essayistic approaches to questions of ‘value’ in the literary and cultural sectors.

Join us in Parramatta to launch Second City: Essays from Western Sydney on Wednesday 26 May at 6:00pm

Announcing the recipients of the 2021 Incubate writers’ residencies, a joint initiative of the SRB and the Bankstown Arts Centre.

See me. See this. Wojnarowicz calls you to witness, which is why his work feels so intimate even when he’s really addressing everyone at once. These days I see the edge of mortality. And because he did, he’s one of a handful of artists of whom I have wished to be worthy; worthy of his artistry and spirit, and I know that I am far from the only one for whom this is so.

At times, as Arabs, lost in the world of displacement, marginalised by our dispersal, and racialised as inferior to our Western counterparts, we can become weary of our lived experiences as diasporic subjects. But with writing as empowering, affecting and beautiful as Sakr’s poetry, or testimonials as stimulating as those assembled by Abdel-Fattah and Saleh, can we dare become ‘tired’ of diaspora writing in any of its modes?

‘What’s the use?’ is an irresistible refrain when living under the illegitimate jurisdiction of so-called Australia. It is difficult to break the patterns of non-consent, policing, and harm when the poor and marginalised have to constantly fight for their survival, and prove their utility-value to the state.

Comics seem to find critical acclaim in the mainstream only under certain conditions. First, they must deal with bleakly mature themes. Second, they must do so in a cartoony style that belies their seriousness, to paraphrase their mainstream reviewers. (What comics style isn’t somehow cartoony?) The graphic novel section in any given bookstore thus leans towards warzone journalism, family drama and wrenching confessionals. Despite constant reminders that comics have grown up, the non-comics reading public probably picture them less as a medium fulfilling its potential, than as one held back after class and tasked with writing multiple essays on very heady topics, as punishment for earlier mischief-making. Cementing but also subverting this image is Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, which, in a first for comics, was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize.

Dawn of a day too dark to call tomorrow is an imploration for the importance of affect and emotional immediacy in the wake of the collapse of the information age.