Introducing the Frank Moorhouse Reading Room project, author and critic Tegan Bennett Daylight reflects on the generational shifts that have shaped Australian writing as well as the creative and industrial legacies of Frank Moorhouse.

Reading across several decades of Frank Moorhouse’s essays on the writing life, author Gina Ward maps Moorhouse’s changing sense of vocation, and the ruinous effects of rising economic precarity on the writers of his generation.

From Vietnam to Gaza, Eda Gunaydin considers the recent and historical convergences of mass politics and anti-war sentiment, examining the role of artists at moments of political mobilisation as well as their vulnerability to state surveillance.

Introducing the 2024 CA-SRB Emerging Critics Fellows.

As an open access literary journal that was ‘born digital’, the SRB considers the maintenance and renewal of its digital…

Kate Briggs’ The Long Form is equal parts fiction and a critical survey of the history of fictionality. In her review, Sophie Gee shows how Briggs’ formal experiments and portraits of intimate relations return us to the origins of the novel form.

The poet Forugh Farrokhzad remains a muse for different generations of diasporic Iranians. Reviewing Hossein Asgari’s novel Only Sound Remains, Max Bledstein opens out the personal and political histories telescoped into the poet’s ardent legacy

What are the stakes of literary biography? Sam Twyford-Moore poses this question in reviewing two recent books on Frank Moorhouse, addressing issues ranging from the ethics of disclosure to the intersections between biography and cultural history.

What are the stakes of literary biography? Sam Twyford-Moore poses this question in reviewing two recent books on Frank Moorhouse, addressing issues ranging from the ethics of disclosure to the intersections between biography and cultural history.

In this labile essay, Gareth Morgan plumbs the depths of the pool as a site of ritual, recreation, and the poet’s labour. From Mohenjo-daro to Carlton, Morgan recovers from the concrete history of public bathing a poetics of the ‘locus amoenus’.

What if we approached video games as we do poems? In this essay, Vidyan Ravinthiran proposes a new way of writing about gaming: a poetics that gives as much credence to the rhythms and repetition of fingerwork as to the patterns of storytelling.

Josefina Huq records the sibling intimacies fostered by the world-building of the Kirby video game franchise. Charting the vicissitudes of growing up and apart, the games serve as a reminder of all that she and her brother refuse to leave behind.

In the proliferation of discourses and identities online, critique is often shadowed by its double: conspiracy. In this review, James Ley situates Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger within the re-emergence of the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics.

As judge and author, Barron Field exemplified the Romantic figure of the poet as legislator. Louis Klee reviews a recent study of Field’s legacy that lays bare the connection between the doctrine of terra nullius and the origins of settler verse.

Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld proposes to examine what happens to aesthetic experience in a culture dominated by algorithms. Reviewing Chayka’s book, Catriona Menzies-Pike finds its solutions flawed yet indicative of our wider structural blindspots.

The Alexandria night-walks give me regular epiphanies, startling little bursts of beauty or revelation that gleam out in sombre-soft places that scowl differently in the day-glare.

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.

If Low gives up on wilderness as a place where scaling ice capped mountains, camping in freezing conditions and traversing icy rivers is about gaining knowledge or progress he does so to reveal the colonial histories which relied on this sort of mythmaking to fortify their connection to the landscape.

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.

I was not a writer when I lived in Singapore. I do not know if I would have become a writer if I had stayed. I do not know if I would still be a writer if I returned.