Emerging Critics 2022

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 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.

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.

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