In a review of Frances Peters-Little’s new biography, musician and historian Toby Martin follows the exemplary career of Jimmy Little, whose life and work attest to popular music’s power to shift cultural and political attitudes.

In her review of Hayley Singer’s collection of essays, Anwen Crawford anatomises the abattoir – from its paradoxes of visibility to its banalisation of life and death – as a subject for literature.

Melanie Walsh looks at how the data company BookScan hold the power to shape publishing companies, authors, and readers, and the emergence of “counterdata”.

In a review of John Kean’s study of the Papunya Tula art movement, Martin Edmond examines the intricate negotiations between aesthetic intention and ritual restriction that made the artists’ work possible.

The City of Parramatta, together with program partners the Sydney Review of Books (SRB) and the Writing and Society Research Centre (WSRC) at Western Sydney University, are calling for applications for the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature.

James Ley dissects the carnal imagination at work in the English translations of Han Kang’s books.

If the narrating consciousness of my non-fiction is a ‘what’ not a ‘who’ then I am not worried about the voice sounding clever nor the ‘narrator’ being ‘interesting’ and worthy of ‘story / opinion’.

What some might call selling out may actually be art listening, responding, and adapting to dynamic changes in the environment in which it is produced.

People often don’t realise my being non-binary means they need to do some work. You can acknowledge my queerness by shaking my partner’s hand but you have to actually change language to get the trans thing right.

Money is like shit, Richard Flanagan said, before publicly donating his prize money to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. I like this statement. But I also know Flanagan wasn’t working in a call centre when he made it, was already a Booker Prize winner, probably living somewhere nicer than a unit with black mould and dripping fixtures. Which begs the question: at what point does the smell become offensive?

Fires, although not ones that flared into storms due to climate change and land mismanagement, have burned through this area before. The story of fire and country, of loss and regrowth is not, at all, my own.

In the dentist’s chair, mortality is both obviated and underlined by the banality and the intensely personal quality of an experience that has almost no role to play in a narrative, other than to allow the banal and the personal to blunder tastelessly into the foreground. We are held back from platitudes about physical decay. There is simply no point, other than irony, in approaching the dentist with the mythical sense of crossing that grips Woolf as she breaths in the gas. The dentist is the everyday manifestation of our otherness to ourselves or, better put, the rearticulation of that otherness as a facet of the everyday.

I then attempt to unblock the blocked emails which, it turns out, come with attached sets of proofs marked HIGH PRIORITY as, due to outsourced publishing deadlines, the expected turnaround is prohibitively tight…

Reading Hofmann has made me wonder whether I got the business of literary criticism wrong. All that straining, for instance: to find meaning and connections, to locate, link up. Why is it a self-evident good? Or the need to be careful, so careful, as in restrained, measured, fair but also taking care of people’s feelings because it’s the right thing to do and because, a separate point this, people break themselves in half to write their books.

At first blush, what all this tends to suggest, at the very least, is that trends in the humanities are underdetermined by the rational adequacy of the theories at the centre of them. But to say – as I did above – that intellectual fashion reflects ‘cool’ obliges us to specify a little more what that might mean. What exactly is ‘intellectual cool’?

In November 2016, Michael Mohammed Ahmad published an essay in the Sydney Review of Books titled ‘Lebs and Punchbowl Prison’….