On writing

Reading Palestine through South American literary and political history, Yumna Kassab reflects on the potency of symbols during times of repression.

Modern experiments in fiction writing have long convinced us that consciousness flows like a stream, but is it true of animals or AI? Ronnie Scott explores the range of narrative techniques used by writers from Lucy Ellmann to Octavia Butler to approach the ‘humanly inaccessible facts’ of consciousness.

Through a series of vignettes, author and bookseller Laura Woollett exposes the lack of transparency, as well as the tensions between building a business and supporting a community, in the publishing industry.

In her review of Hayley Singer’s collection of essays, Anwen Crawford anatomises the abattoir – from its paradoxes of visibility to its banalisation of life and death – as a subject for literature.

How should researchers acknowledge their selfhood in their writing? Kate Rossmanith addresses this question as both a compositional and philosophical issue, unpicking the assumptions behind the most common strategies for self-examination.

Evelyn Araluen on the pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty.

Astrid Lorange reflects on what it might take – conceptually and politically – to rewrite gender as a practice of liberation rather than capture.

What a time to be reading about Annie Ernaux’s self-obliterating affair with S from the Soviet embassy in Paris, not that you’d sense that something’s in the air from the English-language reception to Getting Lost, Ernaux’s diary of the relationship, published in English last September. In the diary and in its generally admiring reviews S is described as a diplomat, apparatchik, attaché, ‘faithful servant of the USSR’ (Ernaux) and Brezhnev nostalgic/Stalin apologist when drunk. Also: ‘He is somewhat, not to say very, anti-Semitic: “Isn’t Mitterrand Jewish?” ’ Pretty standard stuff. Come on. He would have been KGB.

Can the analogy between poetry and work help us understand capitalism in the contemporary moment? Is poetry itself a form of work? 

In the blurb-saturated present, authors can decry blurbs as corrupt and silly all they like. When they publish new books, however, they will still be obliged to solicit blurbs, and most will provide them for friends and colleagues on request.