Fiction

You could back-engineer any number of essays using these keywords: self-aware, self-loathing, self-perception, millennial, narcissism, white woman, privilege, social media, Brooklyn, Trump, Twitter, irony, online, extremely online, internet.

In the concrete, mixed realities we daily inhabit, and in hybridised writings like Cusk’s, taking the fiction out of auto and the auto out of fiction is like trying to take chocolate out of chocolate cake.

Róisín’s re-writing of the perpetual victim back into responsible and efficacious personhood is the resounding accomplishment of this novel.

By having Tussaud pit her wits against men determined to sideline or outmanoeuvre her, Lyons-Lee has herself fashioned a protagonist as wily as any conjurer.

James Joyce once famously said that if it took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, then a reader should take seventeen years to read it. In his usual prophetic way, he turned out to be exactly right.

I quite often like, or at least find satisfaction in being bullied, vilified, and made uncomfortable by a book. I have a life!

Japanese author Sayaka Murata erupted onto the world stage in 2016 with the release of Convenience Store Woman, a novel which sold over a 1.4 million copies. As is often the case with non-Western authors who achieve sudden global recognition, the depth and breadth of her oeuvre was downplayed in favour of a narrative of overnight success. Easier to sell the story of an unknown author who has walked out of a vacuum and just begun.

Vernon Subutex follows a theme set in earlier books by Despentes: the status quo sucks, but we’re all complicit in it one way or another, regardless of our political leanings, sometimes even in spite of them.

In Nardi Simpson’s impressive debut novel Song of the Crocodile the fictional colonial town Darnmoor ‘itself is nothing’. It is a construction to begin with and for the sovereign Billymil family it doesn’t exist; they are Yuwaalaraay people, removed from their custodial lands and relegated to the Campgrounds on the edge of the town when Darnmoor was built over their Country.

One summer evening, as fires rage elsewhere in the country, three women at different stages of life are sequestered in the plush chill of the Melbourne Theatre Company watching Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.