To call into question the literary value of Dalton’s fiction is not to disqualify the pleasure and imaginative release that hundreds of thousands of readers have found in his novels, especially Boy Swallows Universe; it is to take that popularity seriously.

Ultimately, it is of little consequence whether or not Morrison is genuine in his religious beliefs. He probably is.

Tolstoy Together isn’t meant to be a standalone book but a companion to War and Peace, a prolonged conference of avid reading minds, a guidebook not for pre-reading but for reinforcement of the distributed memories shared among the travellers after each day’s exploration.

While the reader can sympathise with West’s reluctance to impose his own ideas on the prisoners, where does this leave the debate around prison abolition and reform? And what validity, one is tempted to ask, do reform and abolition movements have if their agendas are not co-opted by those most affected?

‘The neighbourhood, as I have started to record it, has started to fade into nostalgia.’

‘This idea of difference, reinforcing difference through representation, and how this relates to social power, is what I want to use this book as an opportunity to think more about.’

What the First Nations writers in This All Come Back Now reveal is that the only civilization in need of saving is the present western capitalist one – for its capacity to self-destruct and for its inability to listen.

What are the aesthetic possibilities offered by Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney’s blockbuster 2021 novel? To answer this question, we might look at the novel’s plot, characters, themes, style, narrative form. But we might also, inspired by a pragmatic view of art, look at how readers have made use of the novel.

How alienating, how jarring, to be made aware that you’re one step away from a cascading world of ones and zeros instead of live, decaying art objects. Get free of queues and tickets and blood-sugar crashes, but can’t shake the feeling that a high-quality colour book reproduction would offer a superior form of viewing. Wonder if Walter Benjamin could have dreamed of such a flaccid form of artistic replication as a virtual gallery tour.

Sydney Review of Books and the Bankstown Arts Centre invite applications from Western Sydney and First Nations writers and journalists to document the 2022 Bankstown Biennale, which launches on 8 October 2022. We’re looking for writers and cultural journalists who can undertake reportage-driven projects that document the development of work for the Biennale, spotlight artists and draw out the themes of Sub Terrains 2022.

The Sydney Review of Books invites applications for the 2022 CA-SRB Emerging Critics Fellowships.

Applications close at 11:59pm on Monday 13 June 2022.

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.

The Game distinguishes itself because Kelly… rejects the notion that personhood is best understood in terms of a surface-depth model. In fact, Kelly is perpetually suspicious of the view that politicians (or people) consist of two divisible parts – a performance and a private self to which the performance obliquely refers.

As I begin to write kin and ethics a dear writing friend corresponds with me in messages about writing and love and rallying and the idea of being ‘inside the between’ when we come close how there is a ‘turning there’ how it is ‘the both of us’ and how the work of language of prepositions and prepositional thinking opens derring-do to a means of queering and transing language that becomes possible.

I am perplexed by the space Stegemann gives to lashing political progressives, but I never doubt his sincerity. It would have been easier for him to bark the orthodoxy as it is understood by those people most likely to be his readers. And perhaps his views are closer to some progressive First Nations thinking than might be comfortable for those of us fretting away in the urban centres.

In Araluen’s work spirits and ghosts speak from beyond, above and below the layers of colonial time to remind us of past in present and present in past intertwined and unresolved.

In the heat of this unfolding crisis, vice-chancellors accidentally reveal the underlying logics of the spreadsheet. Budgets must be reduced, savings must be made; they tell us this as they consult the spreadsheet that surrounds them like a moat. The spreadsheet contains hard data, raw data, objective truths, they say. The numbers don’t lie. But the document is as much an operation of judgement as it is one of fiscal analysis; the spreadsheet obscures as much as it reveals.