To make a decision entails a kind of travel – thought travel – with stopping points and progression. To live with a decision is to feel the sensation of firm ground, of arrival. It is to look back and construct a reassuring story of your mind’s route, a story possessing the stability of structure, of foundation, coupled with the exhilaration of onward movement.

The longer I spent with these essays, the more I enjoyed the connections Berry creates between humans and nonhuman animals in real life, their diffusion into products for human consumption, and their symbolism.

Kassab presents a full and rich account of life outside of major cities, and, continuing the moral project begun in her debut work, House of Youssef, she draws us into this world to separate myth from reality.

Wild Curious Air finds its material in what has come before, digs into the turbulence and profusion of the present, and propagates the demand that we attend to the reality and urgency of this moment.

In these three books, mothers write back, documenting their personal experience and that of others, from the scientific and the sociological to the artistic. They all beg the question: is it possible to be successful both as a mother and do other things beside childcare and housework? In the act of writing, they answer as one, yes!

To get to what Western Sydney means now, we need to begin in the past, like what happens when two Sheilas meet on stolen land.

In permitting the reader ample space for introspection, Kofman’s narrator is as good a listener as she is a writer. And like any good listener, her role is not to leap to the rescue with answers or advice.

The Last One takes us with Fatima as she builds both an individual and collective identity through old and new connections and orientations.

Your story is one of defiance and ongoing resistance, Ronnie. Every day you drew breath as a Black woman wearing a blue uniform you were resisting. You may have been required to walk in that world, but your bare Black feet never left our world.

We’re thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2022 CA-SRB Emerging Critics Fellowships are Kasumi Borczyk, Megan Cheong, Jenny Fraser, Muhib Nabulsi and Adalya Nash Hussein.

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 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.

Reading Hofmann has made me wonder whether I got the business of literary criticism wrong. All that straining, for instance: to find meaning and connections, to locate, link up. Why is it a self-evident good? Or the need to be careful, so careful, as in restrained, measured, fair but also taking care of people’s feelings because it’s the right thing to do and because, a separate point this, people break themselves in half to write their books.

I have returned to Cold Light, the third novel in the Edith Trilogy by Frank Moorhouse, time and time again. One of my reasons for going back to it is, as is often the case with writers, self-interest.

‘The when-and-where of my initial reading was this wildly unstructured but avidly associative scramble through historical and imaginative space-and-time.’