Reviews

Japanese author Sayaka Murata erupted onto the world stage in 2016 with the release of Convenience Store Woman, a novel which sold over a 1.4 million copies. As is often the case with non-Western authors who achieve sudden global recognition, the depth and breadth of her oeuvre was downplayed in favour of a narrative of overnight success. Easier to sell the story of an unknown author who has walked out of a vacuum and just begun.

Vernon Subutex follows a theme set in earlier books by Despentes: the status quo sucks, but we’re all complicit in it one way or another, regardless of our political leanings, sometimes even in spite of them.

Lentin’s objective in Why Race Still Matters is to provide analytic tools that foster anti-racist struggles and encourage coalitional politics. She insists that race still matters because race is still a structure of domination that produces misery and inequality. She tells us that race still matters because racists still exist. And she articulates the value of an epistemology that foregrounds the standpoint of those who experience racism without slipping uncritically into a performance of deference that fragments collectivity. Why Race Still Matters is a vital book for those who wish to understand race, and more importantly, desire to make it matter less.

In Nardi Simpson’s impressive debut novel Song of the Crocodile the fictional colonial town Darnmoor ‘itself is nothing’. It is a construction to begin with and for the sovereign Billymil family it doesn’t exist; they are Yuwaalaraay people, removed from their custodial lands and relegated to the Campgrounds on the edge of the town when Darnmoor was built over their Country.

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.