The Sydney Review of Books

A Place of Punishment: No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani

21.09.18

Published on 16.09.14 in

September 2018

Great Galloping Bush Whiskers

'Like any self-respecting once-upon-a-time story, this one takes place in a world that is both strange and familiar, where the commonplace becomes magical and the most remarkable things are normal. Our hero, Peter, is a young boy who dwells in a snug little bark hut deep in the bush with Crooked Mick, an old bushman and the greatest buckjump rider in all the world.'

19.09.18

Shane Maloney

Australian Fiction

Published on 02.08.18 in

The End of the World As We Know It

'From Armageddon to Ragnarok and the Rapture, humans persist in imagining the end of the world. The religious term is eschatology, and the literary terms are many. Some are jocular (Disaster Porn), or precisely denote a sub-genre (Post-Apocalypse, Solarpunk). Climate change or Anthropocene fiction is the latest variant on the theme, and if we believe our scientists — and woe betide us if we do not — these may be the final words.'

17.09.18

Lucy Sussex

Australian Fiction

Published on 19.04.13 in

Protesting 1938 & 1988 – from Capricornia to Oscar & Lucinda

14.09.18

Craig Munro

Published on 19.02.16 in Australian Fiction, Features

Six Degrees from the City: Episode 6 – Oliver Phommavanh

14.09.18

Fiona Wright

Published on 14.06.13 in Podcasts, Interviews

Iain Sinclair’s Archive

'Now, in The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City, Sinclair declares himself done with London as subject. These will be his last dispatches on and from the city which has made his name. The Last London is bracketed at beginning and end with the words of Great Fire of 1666 diarist John Evelyn: ‘London was, but is no more.’ In making this analogy with the disaster that razed seventeenth-century London, Sinclair affirms that twenty-first century London, too, has been destroyed. This time by a crew of gentrifiers, property developers, politicians, hyper-affluent transplants, and the creative classes. '

10.09.18

Kirsten Seale

Non-Fiction

Published on 15.08.18 in

Figures in Geometry: The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones

'What we have entered here is a mise-en-abyme of ekphrasis: the text and images of one book, and the description of a painting in a notebook, all contained within another book, call up a cascade of images for the reader of this novel about art.'

07.09.18

Robert Dixon

Published on 15.08.18 in

Waking Up: Yan Lianke’s The Day The Sun Died

'Although the year in which the novel is set is not specified, it is tempting to view the work’s thematization of dreams in the context of the popular political slogan, ‘the Chinese Dream,’ which Chinese President Xi Jinping first proposed in late 2012, declaring that ‘everybody has their own ideal, pursuit, and dream. Today everybody is talking about the Chinese Dream. I believe the greatest dream of the Chinese nation in modern history is the great renewal of the Chinese nation.’ In The Day the Sun Died, Yan Lianke focuses on what may be seen as the nightmarish underbelly of this emphasis on progress. In his novel, dreams are not equated with an optimistic faith in future development, but rather symbolize the way the individual and collective past continues to haunt the present.'

05.09.18

Carlos Rojas

Published on 21.11.17 in

A Book Is A Good Place To Think

It has at times been distressing to witness the media coverage of Kate and Rozanna Lilley’s story, as the intelligence, courage and nuance of their own accounts are temporarily obscured by blunt angles and agendas, by media interest driven in part by celebrity and the tropes of news, in part by various investments held in culture wars positions. But Kate Lilley writes poetry, and poetry offers a space for subjectivity that is not bound to the implied causality of narrative. Poetry can disrupt, evade, and effloresce.

03.09.18

Ali Jane Smith

Poetry

Published on 07.10.16 in

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The SRB is an initiative of The Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University

August 2018

How I Wrote A Poem For Scott Morrison

31.08.18

Dave Drayton

Week in Review

Published on 13.02.18 in Week in Review

Wedged Between the Old and the New

In the career of a poet, the third and fourth books are usually where a certain maturity of voice and style is reached, and a staking out of key thematic ground is achieved. Chong’s formal mastery, her stanzaic control, the deft handling of lyric form, and the use of understated narrative, qualities evolved from the first two collections, are more fully honed in Painting Red Orchids and Rainforest. In a time when younger poets favour ellipsis and discontinuity, when there prevails a distrust of autobiography and narrative in poetry, Chong has, over a quartet of books, crafted a fragmented narrative of migration and settlement, and made of the lyric form a vehicle for the quest for home and belonging.

31.08.18

Kim Cheng Boey