Most fiction treats workers as fully external creatures, carrying their physicality as a symbol of their position within the division of labour; Weiss presents them as the authentic bearers of our collective human cultural destiny. It is a question of how these workers, who pay for the very possibility of culture with the surplus created by their labour, attain it, and even come to represent it, themselves. By sheer force of will, and the necessity of an inner compulsion, these young men and women return from the shop floor, physically exhausted but spiritually on fire, to study, debate, and reflect.

My question, given the evidence that Sheffer provides, is ‘Why?’ Why should moral judgements about Asperger be withheld? I’m not asking this of Sheffer alone, but of anyone who hesitates to judge people who were as involved in the Nazi genocide of disabled people as Asperger certainly was.

All the loss, all the longing, all the pain, and with it this time, at least, an understanding of this compulsion to write, this refuge in writing. When I am writing, I am always writing to my mother.

Changing what one sees is particularly relevant in the arts where the representation of reality is core business. Unconscious bias in statements from decision-makers to which I have been both privy and at the receiving end that – to take just a few examples – CALD Australian artists do not ‘bring in a crowd’ or that any success we may enjoy is due to a prevaling ‘ethnic commodity fetishism/favouritism’ is no less offensive or ghettoising for being contradictory.

In the context of the now more-or-less complete collapse of the New Left, the pulp novels of the fifties and early sixties deserve reconsideration, since, in some ways, contemporary pop culture today occupies a similar space, in that it’s produced almost entirely by commercial businesses with no relationship to any real social struggle.

‘“Begin, I tell myself, at the beginning of an adventure, not at the end of a marriage of twenty years.” It is with this line that Hilary McPhee opens the second chapter of her second memoir. It’s telling, both because it reads almost like an editorial intervention – as if the editor is present even as she writes – but also because it indicates that there’s something much more important going on than the ‘adventure’ that forms the main narrative arc of the book.

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.

Events like these used to feel like warnings. Freak tides, catastrophic fires, once-in-a-century storms. We used to describe them as omens of a time to come. Now they are the times we live in.

Only a few short decades ago, we may have only felt their stealth and thought of them as understudies to real villainry. With bodies littering roads around the world and no end in sight, their presence is unavoidable, the existential questions they pose real. It has been a blockbuster season in Australia.

If “we” are to decolonise, then that requires de-structuring, dismantling, breaking, and disrupting what is constructed to maintain colonisation.

Scott’s new novel, N, is longer and more ambitious than any of his previous works, but it develops the interest in the parallel possibilities of Australian history that is evident in Warra Warra. In this case, it is Australia’s experience of the Second World War.

Open House is part of the continued resurgence of David Brooks as a poet. Although he has now published four collections of poetry since 2005, the first of these, Walking to Point Clear, was his first in 22 years. He is also the author of novels, short fiction, essays and non-fiction: Open House is part of a much larger field of language-making.

Kefala’s output is highly accomplished and highly individual. She seems, like all real writers, to have been clear about what she was doing from the very beginning, even when what she was doing involved a lot of uncertainties.

My skin is white, or rather it is a soft, warm pink, which is the colour of the skin of the most dangerous and successful pillagers in recent times. I descend from them. I am them. Nothing is random. I am capable of killing another person but I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to survive an apocalypse.

Wood’s writing continues to grow in assurance which each new work: never fussy, but grounded, and intensely physical.