Australian literature

Three years into Charmian Clift’s stint of weekly essays written for the Melbourne Herald and Sydney Morning Herald, there is…

Where will you go? Will you follow Lili, an Australian young woman of Asian heritage in 1980s France, or Lyle, a middle-aged man who also migrated from Asia in post-pandemic Australia?

The suggestion to ‘turn to the voices and perspectives of non-white writers, comedians and politicians’ as a corrector to white privilege, shines light on the relative absence of those with no access to the media at all and whose everyday struggles are much more indicative of what antiracism in practice really looks like.

I wanted to collect the best of our spec fic writing together in this basket of like-minded genres, so that the stories could all be read in their proper cultural context, side by side with their siblings.

Kassab presents a full and rich account of life outside of major cities, and, continuing the moral project begun in her debut work, House of Youssef, she draws us into this world to separate myth from reality.

The longer I spent with these essays, the more I enjoyed the connections Berry creates between humans and nonhuman animals in real life, their diffusion into products for human consumption, and their symbolism.

Wild Curious Air finds its material in what has come before, digs into the turbulence and profusion of the present, and propagates the demand that we attend to the reality and urgency of this moment.

In permitting the reader ample space for introspection, Kofman’s narrator is as good a listener as she is a writer. And like any good listener, her role is not to leap to the rescue with answers or advice.

Your story is one of defiance and ongoing resistance, Ronnie. Every day you drew breath as a Black woman wearing a blue uniform you were resisting. You may have been required to walk in that world, but your bare Black feet never left our world.

We might, like Ćehić’s characters, brood on our paralysis by the information economy in its seamless loop of sampling, packaging and delivering our private desires to our doors. But what else can we say besides the obvious cultural diagnosis and the self-affirming circuit of the minimalist style in the age of distractions? Is there a way to argue for a technique that is not about the internet, our lord and saviour, at least not solely?