‘Is the year 2020 a propitious time to be reading the untimely Eileen Chang? To some, Chang’s refusal of the moralism attaching to a more committed witnessing of history will always make her work appear trifling, “so much froth” riding atop the “vast oceanic swells” of modern history (to borrow from her own stock of images). And certainly at a time when Hong Kong has become a flashpoint for Chinese nationalism, stories such as “Love in a Fallen City” and “Lust, Caution” might seem a little jarring. By the same token, however, Chang’s translocalism – her work’s inability to accommodate the prevailing myths of and monuments to the nation – can only be salutary in light of the Chinese state’s recent push towards linguistic standardization and cultural homogenization. But it is perhaps with respect to our intimate lives that Chang’s work continues to resonate most strongly.’

The archive shows that Anderson enjoyed both very limited editorial intervention into Tirra Lirra by the River and suffered from the over-reach of her publisher. In each case the manuscripts and letters reveal comments made by reviewers and critics emphasising the significance of Anderson’s archival record. The archives speak loudly about the power of editing and publishing practices both as a spark and a wet blanket.

Drones are not simply observers of events, but active participants in their making. They move the air around them, react to the force of wind, decode signals and encode new ones, detect and respond to objects and bodies, capture worldly phenomena and transform it into data. How they make knowledge matters because the drone can act on what it knows. That action takes place along a continuum that extends from minor adjustments of position to the application of lethal force. It might hover in place, zoom in closer, even kill.

In the dentist’s chair, mortality is both obviated and underlined by the banality and the intensely personal quality of an experience that has almost no role to play in a narrative, other than to allow the banal and the personal to blunder tastelessly into the foreground. We are held back from platitudes about physical decay. There is simply no point, other than irony, in approaching the dentist with the mythical sense of crossing that grips Woolf as she breaths in the gas. The dentist is the everyday manifestation of our otherness to ourselves or, better put, the rearticulation of that otherness as a facet of the everyday.

Lohrey has spent more than three decades chronicling Australian masculinity with a curious and sympathetic eye, but The Labyrinth is in large part about what it feels like to be a woman in Australia.

For those of us lucky enough to grow old with our parents, we enter into a particular type of complicity. We do not want anything from them. We do not want them to change or to show us something they haven’t already shown. It’s too late for that. The only thing we want is perhaps the hardest thing of all for them to provide: an affirmation of their own happiness.

Nonfiction-as-speculation feels oxymoronic. The two words tug against each other, ‘nonfiction’ leaning toward documentation, ‘speculation’ toward imagining. A strange hybrid genre results that strives to offset the bloodless abstraction of scientific projections and the future’s unreality.

Money is like shit, Richard Flanagan said, before publicly donating his prize money to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. I like this statement. But I also know Flanagan wasn’t working in a call centre when he made it, was already a Booker Prize winner, probably living somewhere nicer than a unit with black mould and dripping fixtures. Which begs the question: at what point does the smell become offensive?

Trapped inside my house, I exist in multiple worlds at once: the shocked writer with the shortlisted first book; the absent academic with the unfinished manuscript; the aunty who reads her latest manuscript to her nieces and nephews every night, and revels in their excitement. I feel trapped in a waved-tossed dinghy: Can I write? No, I can’t! Maybe I can? No wonder I feel nauseous.

As public awareness of the virus grows, the media dictates new territories of knowledge, airing the collective voices of isolation and helplessness in the face of rising human losses. In the charting of statistics and updates, a new hyper-present emerges in which the writer’s task of imagining new worlds feels awkward, subject to a field of speculation shaped by cycles of news, all vying for the best truth, the most profitable predictions. I come to rely less on reading and believing, and more on observing metaphors and making notes on transmission and contagion like a scientist whose detachment still allows for curiosity and the possibility of change.

‘is this book worth reading? A book review—while it can be many things—is not really a review unless it offers some form of explicit or implicit evaluation in a way that meaningfully answers this question.’

We are traumatised yet again, and yet again our voices are extinguished by not only flames and ash, but by narratives of settler suffering of this ‘hard’ and ‘extreme’ Country that settlers are still yet to actual settle into. The narrative of fear once again dominates: of black fullas, black voices, black solutions, blackened trees, blackened houses, blackened businesses, and black streets.

On the cover, A Short History of Richard Kline is identified as a ‘pilgrim’s progress for the here and now’. For Lohrey, the here and now demands an easily accessible realist narrative rather than Bunyan’s choice of allegory. That may be the right call, but realism curtails the freedom that allegory offers readers to bring their own meanings and experiences to the text.

The appearance of Evie Wyld’s novel in Anne Brontë’s bicentennial year prompts thoughts about the relation between the writings of these two angry women. The continuities are striking. Deeply religious, Anne used the back of her prayer book to record, in tiny letters, her response to all she had witnessed: ‘sick of mankind | And their disgusting ways’. We can’t know for certain whether, when she wrote ‘mankind’, she had the human species or the male sex in mind, but I lean towards the latter. Now, reading The Bass Rock, I feel as if Wyld had written boldly underneath Anne’s words: ‘Me Too’.

It has only been four years since Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven’s first volume, Comfort Food, appeared. While central to both collections are the experiences of young queer First Nations identity in settler Australia, Throat extends the work of Comfort Food from the retrospective of the four years that have passed since its writing. And, certainly much has happened.