Australian literature

Why has it taken me so long to write this review of The Most Important Job in the World? Whenever I…

These two speculative works offer visions of the future in which the earth is devastated. Each involves humans living disrupted, transformed lives – defying or redefining extinction, carrying on, muddling through.

I am looking for something to say about the short story as a category, something to distinguish it, and my mind alights on the word ‘fun’.

What Fugitive does is to enact the sensation that emerges when you play or listen to music: a tactile excitement, a kinaesthetic sense of the sacred

Gerald Murnane’s meticulously self-curated ‘Chronological Archive’ – as distinct from his ‘Literary Archive’ and ‘Antipodean Archive’, both of which he likewise compiled…

Skrzynecki writes as a storyteller who recalls nature, family, and friends, as well as time and place, with narratological detail.

By beginning Case Notes with poems about dogs, David Stavanger establishes from the beginning that his book is not purely the interrogation of the archival self, of self-research, that we might imagine from its title.

Reading expands the mind, and when you’ve got weak personal boundaries it can be as wild and dangerous an experience as living.

In both books, the aspiration – to be the Asian actor who makes it big – is quickly diminished by the reality. It’s another version of the model minority myth, where even if you win, there’s an element of losing.

The Winter Road, in charting a long and complex case that extends over years, with numerous participants with conflicting agendas and personalities, signals her development as a writer.