In contrasting ways, Sam Vincent’s memoir My Father and Other Animals and Rick Morton’s anthology Growing Up in Country Australia complicate clichéd notions of rural life.

These two speculative works offer visions of the future in which the earth is devastated. Each involves humans living disrupted, transformed lives – defying or redefining extinction, carrying on, muddling through.

Why has it taken me so long to write this review of The Most Important Job in the World? Whenever I…

I am looking for something to say about the short story as a category, something to distinguish it, and my mind alights on the word ‘fun’.

Driving was something that was for other people, a way of interfacing easily with the world that I would always lack. 

In Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever, tiny comets blaze across the pages. Connecting disparate histories, their orbits disrupt the order of…

What Fugitive does is to enact the sensation that emerges when you play or listen to music: a tactile excitement, a kinaesthetic sense of the sacred

Is Garbes’s unifying vision enough to confront what we are up against? Or is radical motherhood only the first stop on the road to mass politics for collective justice?

Gerald Murnane’s meticulously self-curated ‘Chronological Archive’ – as distinct from his ‘Literary Archive’ and ‘Antipodean Archive’, both of which he likewise compiled…

The Winter Road, in charting a long and complex case that extends over years, with numerous participants with conflicting agendas and personalities, signals her development as a writer. 

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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.