Reviews

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.

In the concrete, mixed realities we daily inhabit, and in hybridised writings like Cusk’s, taking the fiction out of auto and the auto out of fiction is like trying to take chocolate out of chocolate cake.

In Araluen’s work spirits and ghosts speak from beyond, above and below the layers of colonial time to remind us of past in present and present in past intertwined and unresolved.

Róisín’s re-writing of the perpetual victim back into responsible and efficacious personhood is the resounding accomplishment of this novel.

Like Murphy’s, my heart is housed in a body that is judged for being ill-mannered or slow when I cannot hear people speaking to me, and like her, the architecture of the culture through which we move causes me immense stress. My life story, like hers, is affected by the movement and stillness of hammer, anvil and stirrup – and indeed these three tiny bones caused our lives to intertwine.

By having Tussaud pit her wits against men determined to sideline or outmanoeuvre her, Lyons-Lee has herself fashioned a protagonist as wily as any conjurer.

As social life becomes increasingly mediated by digital tools, it is ever more imperative to understand how people incorporate technology into their routines, as well as how technologies spark new forms of engagement, identity, and interaction.

Anwen Crawford’s remarkable new work of non-fiction, No Document, is many kinds of document, but one of the ways it can be read is as an attempt to discover a form of writing fit for ephemeral art practices – especially as those practices relate to, or become bound up with, experiences of vulnerability, pain, and mortality.

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.

I quite often like, or at least find satisfaction in being bullied, vilified, and made uncomfortable by a book. I have a life!