Australian literature

Why was Elizabeth von Arnim so quickly and thoroughly forgotten? I wonder if the answer instead lies in the honesty with which she writes about women, the double standards to which they are habitually subjected, and the men whose unthinking or appalling behaviour so often shapes their life trajectories.

Democracy, John Keane tells us, is the friend of contingency.

‘Buried Not Dead is a study in the forces that can both create the conditions for art and cultural flourishing, as well as the conditions for its inhibition and decline.’

Rees is open about her personal connection to her parents’ papers, which does complicate the book.

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.