Australian literature

‘The strangeness of Macris’s stories are not derived from uncommon states; rather, everyday, mundane events are amplified within selves that are captive to modes of behavior within social formations.’ Anthony Uhlmann on Inexperience and other stories

‘Pessoa’s heteronyms owed their existence to his theosophical beliefs, modernist aesthetics and his translation work as much as to his bicultural upbringing. In Letters to Pessoa, Michelle Cahill anchors his spirit figures in history and her own life. At the same time, the kaleidoscope of identities assumed in relation to the canonical names they write to are merely spectral mediums: they do not cohere into a stable entity, nor do they have any direct tie to the author. They do, nonetheless, allow her to work with and through aspects of her postcolonial, diasporic selves. Her family’s origins in Goa, once a colony of Pessoa’s Portugal, and her own birth in Kenya, another ex-colony of Britain, like Pessoa’s Natal, make her another potential avatar of his many heteronyms, as he becomes one of hers: another figure for whom writing offers both exile and private homeland.’

‘How could such a book have fallen out of print? In this little hotel’s self-closed world, with its closed-in days, Stead analyses the legacy of the war, Cold War attitudes, and the rise of international money laundering and tax evasion: forces of history written into the nature of her characters. ‘There are communists even in this country, in Switzerland,’ declares the old American eugenicist Mrs Powell. ‘Why don’t you get busy and stand them all up against a wall?’ The Little Hotel is the shortest of Stead’s novels but it is not minor: all the satiric ambition of her other novels finds dramatic concentration here.’

‘So where might the new configurations of conservative and libertarian lie? Well, one product on offer in the marketplace of ideas that has grown in popularity recently is the tendency of certain conservatives to take the kind of classical ideas espoused by Chris Berg and the IPA and treat them, not as good ideas in themselves, but as characteristic of Australia in a way that draws a thick black line between the proverbial them and us.’ Richard King on three new books about right-libertarianism and conservatism.’

My research and reading confirmed what I’d suspected all along: most interesting texts don’t fall into easy categories. That’s why I wanted to turn my attention to Katz, a writer who understands the art of storytelling and revels in the expressive possibilities of language …

What we are meant to think about are words, about the capacity of language to do other than what it seems to be doing. As someone with a professional interest herself in what tricks language can get up to (‘the sonic out-wraps the saying, the canon is in it for kicks’, the voice of ‘Subvoices’ tells us), Smith has much to say (2016, p. 90). She lets us off lightly of course, as we are disarmed by her sharp wit, but however playful the poetic surface is, the worries about language are real and are communicated.

A parallel narrative to the rise of Whiteley as an artist is the detailed account of his sexual promiscuity and his growing dependence on alcohol and drugs. This ‘other thing’ implied in the book’s title, unfolds for the reader like a train wreck caught in slow motion with drug busts and encounters with customs colouring further an already colourful biography.

[The Media and the Massacre] is, in fact, something more fragile and rare, especially in the largely unreflective world of Australian media. It is a journalist meditating thoughtfully, and at length, on acts of journalism.

The world in which we find ourselves begins to blur around the edges, its parameters shifting and changing. Precisely how we are to understand the room and its relationship to Shelley’s consciousness is never clear, and becomes less clear with each new encounter between the world within and outside its walls.

The most inspired writing in Journey to Horseshoe Bend is in Strehlow’s narratives of ‘storied land’. Many ancestral stories relating to animals — wallabies, emus, fish, birds, snakes — are lucidly and meaningfully given.