Reviews

The best of the stories in Hold Your Fire are those which combine the keenness of Wilson’s perception with a sense of narrative containment.

Tony Birch tells incredibly important stories incredibly well and Dark as Last Night is both an antidote and a lullaby in pandemic times.

Can’t Get You Out of My Head combines a novelistic structure with an essayistic style to create an oblique mode of visual storytelling, uniquely suited to the pause-and-repeat mode of web viewing.

One of the challenges in trying to describe what goes on in this story is that so much takes place in the interstitial spaces, the breach between what happens and what can be said about it – even what can be remembered.

In a sense, the narrator of He plays the role of tour guide through Murray Bail’s memories, addressing his subject’s life retrospectively while exhibiting a more intimate, but not total, knowledge of his thoughts and experiences.

Like many fairy tales that are about coming of age, this novel also explores girlhood, but a girlhood that is indelibly formed by race and most of all — by class.

Didion’s specific genius, once again on display in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, is that she orders her prose with such painstaking precision that one cannot help but glimpse the disorder roiling just beneath.

There are few experiences lonelier than being with people who don’t understand or like you; conversely, it’s quite possible to be physically alone and yet feel deeply connected to the world.

If we take seriously the idea that our personhood in some way inhabits cyberspace, what should we do with the digital remains we leave behind?

Krasnostein’s generosity, curiosity and lack of judgment towards her subjects made me believe that there is a way to stay true to one’s rational self while also being open to other possibilities.