I Am Not Insane: a visual essay by Mary Leunig

One of the pleasures of this book is that it introduces you to artists whose work you may not know very much about; another is to read Daniel Thomas on artists whose work you do know and love.

Incoherence, along with a lack of methodological rigour, is particularly apparent in most writing (not that there is much of it) about how practitioners in the visual arts in Australia and New Zealand have interacted with each other since James Cook sailed over the horizon in 1770.

Mark Mordue’s compelling biography asserts that Nick Cave’s self-mythology is a product of both genuine artistic obsessions, and of the networks of friends and family uniquely equipped to guide and nurture them.

If the photograph, as Susan Sontag claims, is a note-taking form, then these images are notes on suburbia. Suburbia not just as a place but as a way of thinking and living, a lens through which we can see the world and understand our place within it; suburbia as a possibility.

Leonora’s surreal, moving, and satirical novel The Hearing Trumpet was published as a Virago Modern Classic in 1991, which was when I first read it. It was a revelation, moving as it does from a repulsive facility for old women to apocalyptic scenes from a post-atomic New Ice Age. And this year, the New York Review of Books has republished it.