Fiction

Modern experiments in fiction writing have long convinced us that consciousness flows like a stream, but is it true of animals or AI? Ronnie Scott explores the range of narrative techniques used by writers from Lucy Ellmann to Octavia Butler to approach the ‘humanly inaccessible facts’ of consciousness.

What happens to a cultural scene when making rent overtakes the urgency of making art? As Joseph Earp argues, this is the question posed by Max Easton’s Paradise Estate, a new novel charting the declining fortunes of the sharehouse coteries in inner-west Sydney.

What do Barbie and the Oxford English Dictionary have in common? In this review of Pip Williams’ fiction, Catriona Menzies-Pike catalogues the tropes by which popular feminism sells women short.

Shannon Burns reviews André Dao’s novel Anam, a self-reflexive exploration of the ethical and formal quandaries that attend the writing of family history and inheritance.

By probing the interpretative challenges inherent in allegorical writing, Lauren Collee offers a different look at the award-winning speculative work of Laura Jean McKay.

James Ley dissects the carnal imagination at work in the English translations of Han Kang’s books.

Megan Cheong pieces together the ‘mosaic of human responses to the climate crisis’ in Else Fitzgerald’s short stories – stories which rail against generational inequality, while rallying against declinism.

In an expansive review of Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut short story collection, Ursula Robinson-Shaw rethinks our obsession with ‘craft’ and ‘tenderness’ in the context of alt-lit’s aestheticist revival.

Lost child stories have appeared so frequently in our national literature that a vast critical discourse has grown around them. As Peter Pierce suggests, these stories have long been used by white Australians to work through settler anxieties of unbelonging. Elspeth Tilley argues that ‘white vanishing’ narratives, compulsively retold, enable white Australians to assume a victim position. While the search for the lost child offers a chance for the community to rally, assert its heroic qualities, the lost white child functions as a symbol of national innocence, obscuring a history of violent dispossession.

Praiseworthy and I got off on the wrong foot, and I blame it on the cop in my head. When I agreed to write this review, I thought I would read the book and file my piece within a few short weeks. Ha! Reading this book as an Aboriginal reader, I was never going to be let off the hook that easily. Makes sense, as cops and blackfellas don’t mix.