Reviews

Reading expands the mind, and when you’ve got weak personal boundaries it can be as wild and dangerous an experience as living.

The Winter Road, in charting a long and complex case that extends over years, with numerous participants with conflicting agendas and personalities, signals her development as a writer. 

I don’t think good queer memoir needs to have a didactic relationship to ideological representation. But there is, here, a more sophisticated understanding of representation than we’ve seen in Australian memoir recently. It can be important and necessary to build your identity using what you see around you, but this work is collaborative rather than transactional or instructional.

In both books, the aspiration – to be the Asian actor who makes it big – is quickly diminished by the reality. It’s another version of the model minority myth, where even if you win, there’s an element of losing.

‘Stories of Aboriginal heroism (like that of Yarri and Jacky Jacky) are not new. In fact, our oldest stories tell of characters of high esteem, knowledge, and courage.’

7 ½ is a manifesto of Tsiolkas’s evolved ideas about art, and a testimony to the lived experience of the past two years. At its core, it is concerned simultaneously to sketch the blind cruelty of global disaster and to find and celebrate the beauty and joy in the ordinary simplicity of everyday life.

What could be more humiliating than to write and be read, to be thought about and perceived by strangers?

Revenants creates a liminal zone of perception in Adam Aitken’s oeuvre.

The ABC may not anymore be in the immediate peril that the BBC is, but the danger remains broadly the same. If we want to save the ABC from that danger, then taking it for granted will no longer be an option.

I can’t stop thinking about People Who Lunch. The book interrupts my sleep and I desperately want to discuss it with everybody. I loved it even as I was aware of the ways that it frustrated me.