Australian literature

Hard Joy widens the lens, looking back across the span of seventy years to consider those fundamental human questions of what makes us, and who makes us.

Summertime makes plain what we ought not need to be told: we are already living in the dreaded future, and that this dreaded future already forms part of our past.

In the week before the May 2022 general election, decks of playing cards depicting a boat in distress were distributed…

Toltz’s loquacious and rambling style seems, in isolation, to carry an aphoristic indictment of our techno-saturated society. But put together, what does it mean? Do they even belong together?

Our Members be Unlimited is a book of about workers and their unions. It starts out with the formation of the first workers union in a dark field in Europe, and takes us all the way to the first rumblings of new unions in gig-economy workplaces like the Amazon fulfilment centre. It’s an innovative new onramp for a modern politics of collectivism and its possibilities.

What happens, in that moment of encounter, when a book states its intention, pre-empting the act of reading it?

Why was Elizabeth von Arnim so quickly and thoroughly forgotten? I wonder if the answer instead lies in the honesty with which she writes about women, the double standards to which they are habitually subjected, and the men whose unthinking or appalling behaviour so often shapes their life trajectories.

Democracy, John Keane tells us, is the friend of contingency.

‘Buried Not Dead is a study in the forces that can both create the conditions for art and cultural flourishing, as well as the conditions for its inhibition and decline.’

Rees is open about her personal connection to her parents’ papers, which does complicate the book.