Reviews

From recycled textiles to photosynthetic sweaters, fashion has ostensibly committed itself to sustainability. But is it more than a passing trend? Reviewing Clare Press’ Wear Next, Carody Culver considers the complexities of both defining fashion and imagining the industry’s future.

Luke Carman reviews Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, a translated novel depicting a linguist’s experience of psychosis and institutionalisation. As Carman argues, the novel’s distinctively ‘minimalist’ style underlines ‘a contingent relationship to sanity’ to which we are all vulnerable.

About three-quarters through Acrobat Music: New & Selected Poems, Jill Jones nudges the reader knowingly in the ribs. ‘Difficult Poem’…

Since the 1980s, fiction has become big business. In her review of Dan Sinykin’s wide-ranging study of American publishing, Alice Grundy argues for the importance of the demythologising effects of Sinykin’s institutionalist approach for both literary scholarship and industrial relations.

In her review of Jennifer Croft’s new novel, Alice Whitmore unearths the hidden correspondences between the fungal kingdom and the world of translation.

What makes sentient machines tick? In a review of Lorraine Daston’s ‘Rules’, Nicholas Heron traces the history of the algorithm, showing that at stake in the age of AI is our very understanding of rationality.

Through a reading of Jane Carey’s historical study, Jessica White tracks the paths made by Australian women through the settler academy in the ardent pursuit of science.

Mindy Gill parses the influence of George Eliot on Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, The Fraud – a capacious and non-linear work, the pluralistic ambition of which has put critics ‘off-balance’

Drawing on the insights of two new books of literary criticism, Joshua Barnes argues that recent developments, such as the rise of autofiction, should serve to remind us that the novel, fiction, and realism are distinct categories despite their historical convergence.

Lucy Van reviews π.O.’s The Tour, a pugnacious verse chronicle of a poetic caper around the United States. From his dirty t-shirt to his dissatisfactions with American food, π.O.’s emblematic gestures of refusal characterise a volume that, for Van, exposes ‘the orders and disorders of our national poetry’.