Reviews

Salesses asks what forms of fiction writing, and hence ways of being in the world, are marginalised in conventional understandings of craft? Conversely, how do different ways of being in the world – that is, not being part of the culturally dominant population – express themselves in a writer’s craft?

In Jennifer Mills’ The Airways, we travel through a series of bodies. The we here is us, the readers, but we share this journey with something else too – a ghost, a consciousness, something that speaks and thinks and feels but isn’t necessarily a body. It is something that will call into question the way we think about bodies.

The direction of indirection, or the discipline of indiscipline (to quote Frank Moorhouse) gives her writing a flow that is beguiling as well as relaxing. It suspends questions of interpretation and replaces them instead with interactions: the meaning of a work of art, whether from the Renaissance or from last week, is not to be written down like the answer to a question posed in an examination; it is found in our relationship to it, what we do or don’t do with or around it.

One of the pleasures of Mother & I is joining Ware in the gradual discovery of his mother’s multitudinous character.

If Low gives up on wilderness as a place where scaling ice capped mountains, camping in freezing conditions and traversing icy rivers is about gaining knowledge or progress he does so to reveal the colonial histories which relied on this sort of mythmaking to fortify their connection to the landscape.

Sometimes she is a well-ordered educator: to tell you B, I must first tell you A. Sometimes she is like a friend telling tall tales at the pub, three pints in. Sometimes she is a preacher. Sometimes she is a contextualist, filling in history’s gaps.

The precocious teenage girl looms large in pop music, a culture that has always been enamoured by stories of youthful ingenuity.

Alone in my apartment in lockdown, water fills my mind. It carries adventures I once had, of stories from my life and other lives, of homes, dreams, memories. Vast and unknowable; endless and opportune.

All three books help characterize how and in what ways digital solutions are featuring in environmentalism and to what end. More data about environmental systems and models are certainly useful, but asking how the data animates new forms of collective action is critical.

Small Joys of Real Life is a quintessentially Melbourne book, with Richards’ characters not straying far from the city and the inner-north postcodes: from share houses to public swimming pools, pubs to bars.