Australian literature

This image of a woman observed in public, her distraction a sign that she is somewhere else, too, is one that arises again and again in texts that have women contemplate the minds of other women.

The Middle Parts of Fortune is a novel that enables us to understand the bodily, material, and phenomenological aspects of war. It belongs to the age of literary modernism, yet its language and style owed much to Manning’s classicist tastes.

While Archival-Poetics is predominantly text-based, I would not call it a book/s. Like most First Nations knowledge, it does not fit easily into Western categories. To me it felt more like a dream or a deep yarn or a walk through an exhibition –possibly all at the same time. The work is a collection, an archive in its own right, albeit a personal one.

The questions Bishop and Robinson ask are linked: could these disasters have been prevented? But more importantly, how do we keep going?

All this inventiveness reveals to us Farrell’s true love, his pedagogic feel for aesthetics. It is what can keep his humour deadpan and philosophical even as he serves up disintegrated language in novel, variously formed ways

Beginning with his mother’s creased identity card from the era when Cyprus was colonised by the British Kouvaros links the great themes of twentieth-century migration to the affective structures provided by both photography and cinema that give a purchase for those lost and uprooted individuals swept up in these global eddies. His relatively short and multi-faceted meditation provides an analytical scaffold as well as a moving response to his own question – what do we owe our ancestors and the dead?

When we are faced with a world whose problems all seem ‘wicked’ and intractable, what is it that fiction can do?

Hughes asks us to consider the return of the past as an auditory event, as something heard rather than witnessed. The difference is crucial.

Ellena Savage knows intrinsically that the self of memoir or personal essay is never singular, fixed and stable.

The little book of sunlight and maggots celebrates nature but it is not nature as a generalised abstraction, as mere backdrop to human activity, or as picturesque landscapes.