Australian literature

I don’t think good queer memoir needs to have a didactic relationship to ideological representation. But there is, here, a more sophisticated understanding of representation than we’ve seen in Australian memoir recently. It can be important and necessary to build your identity using what you see around you, but this work is collaborative rather than transactional or instructional.

7 ½ is a manifesto of Tsiolkas’s evolved ideas about art, and a testimony to the lived experience of the past two years. At its core, it is concerned simultaneously to sketch the blind cruelty of global disaster and to find and celebrate the beauty and joy in the ordinary simplicity of everyday life.

What could be more humiliating than to write and be read, to be thought about and perceived by strangers?

Revenants creates a liminal zone of perception in Adam Aitken’s oeuvre.

I can’t stop thinking about People Who Lunch. The book interrupts my sleep and I desperately want to discuss it with everybody. I loved it even as I was aware of the ways that it frustrated me.

In a genre dominated by US and UK authors, the addition of another Australian perspective to the campus novel conversation is welcome.

In the wake of the loss of Australian poet Jordie Albiston on the last day of February of this year, I have been reflecting on the profound influence her work had on my reading, writing and appreciation of poetry since I first read excerpts of her work in an undergraduate course reader.

‘One surprisingly persistent theme in Making Australian History is the historical significance of literature, and in particular poetry. Can a poem ‘know’ something, ‘think’ something that history cannot?’

The novel does not unfold so much as it crawls – the way a bot can run through two hundred password combinations a second: by failing again and failing better.

Limberlost is a tender study of the dangers of averting our gaze, and of how we might go through life with very little involvement.