Reviews

She was in full possession of her craft from the very start; The Transit of Venus amounts to a general mobilisation of literary resources that were already present, but not yet fully evident, in the earlier stories.

Each of the editors in Literary Lion Tamers was successful in large part because of their ability to persuade authors to be published by them and, then to convince readers to buy their books.

We are edging unsteadily out of the pandemic, into the rainstorm, into a world in which we might, finally, be able to hug with abandon. Fire, Flood, Plague, and others like it, have magnified voices that speak to the inequities of Australian society.

What we missed told us something about what we are: not the calculating units of neoliberal legend, but social beings first and foremost, whose sociality – whose embodied sociality – is the precondition of our individuality. We missed each other, in other words.

Rowe brings remarkable discernment as she notices what Farmer notices, abstract and concrete – death, insect morphology, marine life – all ‘egalitarian in the designation of worthiness.’ She does so with deference to Farmer’s intense lyricism and with appropriate essayistic economy.

Pity the poor writer whose fate is to be harried with opportunities and accolades. Erpenbeck’s deadpan portrayal of herself as a passive yet accommodating figure, somewhat nonplussed by the attention, makes a substantial claim.

Right from its opening line: ‘The white boys stare at us from the pub’, this story brings its readers into the First Nations community of south coast of NSW and into the realm of Aboriginal protagonist Jackson on the cusp of adulthood.

With each collection of poems, Farrell has absorbed new tones and registers in ways subtle enough that it is easy to miss a decisive shift in the make-up of whimsy and seriousness in his work. And so we may suddenly find, reading Family Trees, that irony, kitsch, and burlesque have started to feel like elegy, philosophy, and flashes of utopian vision.

One summer evening, as fires rage elsewhere in the country, three women at different stages of life are sequestered in the plush chill of the Melbourne Theatre Company watching Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

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.