Australian literature

Murray Bail’s two most recent novels, The Pages and The Voyage, have a repentant air about them, an acknowledgement of limitation and failure, which is all the more striking when set against the encyclopedic ambition characteristic of his earlier novels.

From her superbly accomplished first books Tactics and The Problem of Evil, to this, her sixteenth book of poetry, Maiden’s style has evolved from bitingly tense portraits and narratives with echoing dialogues and soliloquies, constructed in heightened, almost visionary imagery, to a more direct quasi-conversational tone.

Estrangement and the quest to overcome it are at the novel’s core. It is about communion and connection, about the longing for others and to know others – family, lovers, the divine – and the hard work of living and of making the present while toiling over the stuff of the past.

Belinda Castles Hannah and Emil is prefaced by the story of Flora, a newly-pregnant Sydneysider. Flora receives a parcel containing a bequest…

The rhetoric of the publicity campaign for the Classics series is grounded in blame and indignation about the alleged ‘neglect’ of Australian literature by publishers, editors, journalists and, most of all, academics…

In a recent interview, de Kretser said, ‘I like three-dimensional novels that are like walking down a corridor and you find a niche in the wall or a door might be open and you can go into a room or peer in, and sometimes the door is closed but you know there is a space in there.’ Reading her work is an experience just like that.

MTC Cronin is a restless poet. Since her debut collection Zoetrope: We see us moving (1995) was published as part of Five Islands’s now defunct ‘New Poets’ series, she has released another seventeen books, including her latest offering The World Last Night.