Emerging Critics

Megan Cheong pieces together the ‘mosaic of human responses to the climate crisis’ in Else Fitzgerald’s short stories – stories which rail against generational inequality, while rallying against declinism.

In an expansive review of Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut short story collection, Ursula Robinson-Shaw rethinks our obsession with ‘craft’ and ‘tenderness’ in the context of alt-lit’s aestheticist revival.

In an era of sentences that trend not only towards our laziest tendencies but also towards the speed and rhythm of our economy: the elevator pitch sentence, the jump-cut sentence, the news hook sentence, the perfectly manscaped short back and sides sentence, in short the short sentence; a long sentence is antiseptic, so much so that defending its intrinsic value has become something of a moral duty.

There is a sub-genre of metafiction that presents to the reader the writer who can no longer write, but who, in the process of writing about his writer’s block, has written the book that you are reading.

Like many of the memoirs, essays and novels concerning motherhood that have been published in the last decade, Bad Art Mother reaches beyond the reductive ideals of good and bad mothering that have, I imagine, always plagued mothers.

Limberlost is a tender study of the dangers of averting our gaze, and of how we might go through life with very little involvement.

The novel does not unfold so much as it crawls – the way a bot can run through two hundred password combinations a second: by failing again and failing better.

Why was Elizabeth von Arnim so quickly and thoroughly forgotten? I wonder if the answer instead lies in the honesty with which she writes about women, the double standards to which they are habitually subjected, and the men whose unthinking or appalling behaviour so often shapes their life trajectories.

Rees is open about her personal connection to her parents’ papers, which does complicate the book.

This is a book that does not attempt to contain its own reception or anticipate its reader’s reproach. We aren’t asked to pity the protagonist, or to see virtue in her unhappiness. We aren’t asked to find her funny, either, although we do.