Reviews

The Books of Jacob is a book about the internet. That is to say, it’s a response to the experience of encountering information online, and realising as a result that ‘many things remain quietly connected’, as Tokarczuk writes in her postscript. This realisation in turn gives rise to the notion of the system as a whole, a kind of totality – everything that has happened ‘alongside all that might have happened as well or instead.’

‘Buried Not Dead is a study in the forces that can both create the conditions for art and cultural flourishing, as well as the conditions for its inhibition and decline.’

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

The point being there is something incongruous about a biography that looks for answers in the past of a person who, herself, believed she was always in a state of becoming.

Three years into Charmian Clift’s stint of weekly essays written for the Melbourne Herald and Sydney Morning Herald, there is…

Where will you go? Will you follow Lili, an Australian young woman of Asian heritage in 1980s France, or Lyle, a middle-aged man who also migrated from Asia in post-pandemic Australia?

The suggestion to ‘turn to the voices and perspectives of non-white writers, comedians and politicians’ as a corrector to white privilege, shines light on the relative absence of those with no access to the media at all and whose everyday struggles are much more indicative of what antiracism in practice really looks like.

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.

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.

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.