I am writing this essay out of frustration that few people understand the daily working lives of artists and writers and persist in dreamily thinking that our jobs are all dreamy thinking.

Bonny Cassidy’s Chatelaine is a gift to a reviewer that doesn’t want to paraphrase poems, for a reader that doesn’t need such summarising.

The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen chronicles Kneen’s attempts to locate her grandmother’s story and to find how, without the person who made her, she fits into the world.

Follow the western coastline north from Broome, along the Lurujarri Heritage Trail: trudging across sandy beaches, passing dinosaur prints, through mud and mangroves.

That there is no recovery for Blaine as such, that his subsequent path does not offer the pleasures of a neatly resolved narrative, becomes a way of considering broader cultural and political ills.

6 JANUARY 2021. A nondescript room in the US Capitol Building. A Confederate flag is planted in a bin in the corner. Beside it is the flag of the Republic of Vietnam, three horizontal red stripes on a yellow field. Three young men stand around a book on the floor. They each have their phones out, cameras facing each other.

Perec had a succession of pet cats, all of which went by the name Duchat. The Duchats had an essential quality by which one could transform into another.

if the metaphor of the kangaroo is some attempt to speak of what cannot be spoken of, so that it can be objectified and forgotten, the rat speaks of the impossibility of this, the constant return of the repressed, despite the best efforts of settlers to do away with it and live as though the land has always been theirs.

If a plucky leftist were to organise a book club session on Australian unionism, what readings would they set? Our histories of radicalism and workers movements are largely undocumented.

We’re thrilled to share some news about an SRB project that has been in the works for most of 2021. We’re calling it The Circular, and it will be an aggregator that keeps the best new Australian non-fiction in circulation; essays, interviews, reviews, features and more.

The Circular editor will be responsible for collating a weekly newsletter of the most interesting, useful and surprising recent non-fiction published by and about Australian writers.

Second City is a showcase of the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s Western Suburbs such a fertile region for writers. It’s an anthology that brings together raconteurs, reporters and polemicists, critics, philosophers and observers of daily life.

In Nardi Simpson’s impressive debut novel Song of the Crocodile the fictional colonial town Darnmoor ‘itself is nothing’. It is a construction to begin with and for the sovereign Billymil family it doesn’t exist; they are Yuwaalaraay people, removed from their custodial lands and relegated to the Campgrounds on the edge of the town when Darnmoor was built over their Country.

What is particularly exhilarating – and ultimately frustrating – about “53 Days” is the sense that Perec himself hasn’t worked out where the book is going.

The gym is seen as antithetical to writing and intellect. The body doesn’t write, or if it does, it does so in another language. I don’t relate. I do most of my good writing at the gym, feeding off the extremities and horniness that gym contains.

Tan’s worlds in Rubik and Smart Ovens act as alternate realities to our accelerationist, mishmash world: one in which there are seemingly no limits, yet unspoken social mores reign in the background.