What becomes evident is not so much a portrait of Daylight as a reader, but her skill as a critic, her ability to distill enough detail from a work to understand – and convey something of – its essence, to trace the author’s thinking and engagement with the world.

These stories are written in what might be called the deliberately unambitious style of contemporary realism. What is original in them is their structure: they work like fables, though they have a novel’s pacing. They are set in London, Wollongong, Moscow, Sydney, Azabu, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, in Hong Kong, in Kyushu, in Oxford, in a small town near Mount Kosciuskco; even on Mars – and, like fables, they are set nowhere. The characters pay strikingly little attention to place; they speak to each other in much the same way in Wollongong and on Mars. There is rain to be seen, but it is soundless, it has no scent; it does not touch the skin. In these stories, the fable’s clarified settings – a well, a tree, a trap – find their equivalents in the settings of the global city: rooms – bars and restaurants and cafes – and people talking.

Guwayu – a Wiradjuri word – means still and yet and for all times. Guwayu means all times are inseparable; no time is ever over; and all times are unfinished. Guwayu – For All Times releases the arrested times of the Country’s First Peoples held captive in the colonial calendar, and frees kidnapped memories held hostage to false claims of settlement, nationhood, sovereignty and justice. In all First Nations languages, there is a word for all times. And now there is a time for these words. Guwayu breaks the silence Munro’s poem speaks of to unleash the beauty of First Nations words that have been and always will be here.

The Sydney Review of Books is delighted to partner with the Bankstown Arts Centre on a digital writers residency as part of Symbiosis, the Bankstown Biennale 2020. This residency will be an opportunity for a writer to develop an original essay for publication on the Sydney Review of Books. This is a rare opportunity for a writer to develop new work for presentation alongside some of Western Sydney’s most vibrant artists.

Apply by 28 August.

It has only been four years since Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven’s first volume, Comfort Food, appeared. While central to both collections are the experiences of young queer First Nations identity in settler Australia, Throat extends the work of Comfort Food from the retrospective of the four years that have passed since its writing. And, certainly much has happened.

Australia has an obsession with and an expertise in creative accounting. Governments have for years declared that we’re too small a nation to contribute significantly to climate change, while crowing about our status as the world’s number one coal exporter. (Being both the world’s smallest continent and the world’s largest island might have given us the world’s largest chip on the shoulder.) We send our coal overseas and claim that we’re no longer responsible for what happens to it. The logic is flawed, but it’s also embedded in us. We’ve ended up at a point where nation states make agreements about emissions targets and behaviours as though the atmosphere can read our maps.

The Yield is about the elementary miracle of rediscovering oneself; of finding, in the neon-lit recesses of lived and historical pain, a home. It is about the history of this continent as told through the history of Wiradjuri culture. And it is about the fact of this culture existing as a living, breathing work in progress.

His characters are men I have known, men with whom I have lived, hooked-up, been frustrated. They skirt around what they ought to say and try to reinvent themselves and downplay their opportunities and make geographical excuses for their oddities.

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.

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.

Ask any queer girl, I have learnt, and every single one of us had that one friend, usually in high school, whom we liked a bit too much, who we were enchanted by. Sometimes a very best friend, sometimes a girl on the periphery of a friendship circle, but always, always someone we adored, regardless of whether or not we understood exactly why.

This, Clive James’s final book, is a collection of his writings on Larkin and his work. James takes his title from the final words of Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1959). The ninety four pages, which include copies of one manuscript letter and two typed letters from Larkin to James, don’t offer very much book for your money, but you do get Clive James, who’s always good value. His explanation of why Jack Nicholson is the only Hollywood actor appropriate to play Larkin onscreen justifies the price of admission.

‘Gorton’s way of seeing the world and of naming its parts is the quality that sets her debut novel apart from the mass of fiction currently being published in Australia… Most contemporary novels favour substance a long way over style, which can lead to a lot of commonplace sentences. But as one might expect from a poet, Gorton’s every sentence – and not just every sentence, but every phrase and every word – has been turned this way and that in the light of her attention and fitted to the next with the precision of a mosaicist.’ Kerryn Goldsworthy on Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses.

All That Is is both sweeping – a man’s entire adult life is covered, beginning from the age of eighteen and ending in old age, just before serious illness might begin – and minute. Despite the span of time covered in the book, it is under 300 pages. It is a book of small breaths.

In October 2017 I led twenty people around the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. It was a guided walk, but unlike any most in the group had experienced before. Mine was one of five walks in a public arts project aimed to facilitate aural attentiveness to our environment

Terra Nullius is terra nullius, but not as we know it. It’s colonisation, this continent, time, place, Country, race – but not quite as we know it.