Fiction

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.

In an era of sentences that trend not only towards our laziest tendencies but also towards the speed and rhythm of our economy: the elevator pitch sentence, the jump-cut sentence, the news hook sentence, the perfectly manscaped short back and sides sentence, in short the short sentence; a long sentence is antiseptic, so much so that defending its intrinsic value has become something of a moral duty.

The underlying structures that led to Woolf’s thinly veiled racist depiction of Daisy in Mrs Dalloway have reconfigured to shape Mina’s existence in the world as a woman writer of colour. Writing Daisy’s story is a way for Mina to push back and resist the daily draining forces of racism and sexism. Writing is revival, ‘I know what I have to do: tracking her voice, channelling her vibe; that is what matters’, Mina hypes herself, adding ‘[r]esearch seems to work when I’m stuck, turning history, allowing the creative nexus to thrive, to flower, for Daisy to intone leaving her husband, her son, and her household behind.’.

I started Chilean Poet just before Christmas while I was visiting my family in Brisbane and then I finished it during the first days of the new year, while I was ferociously coming down. It was life-affirming and glorious and gently wise and I loved it, needed it. It temporarily restored some sense of hope, like a synthetic serotonin.

Slowly, Shirley also reveals itself as an anti-lifestyle text. For each sparkling marker of inner-city affluence, there is an equal and opposite undercurrent of dread edging the novel towards murkier territory. The clearest – but also least interesting – instance is the enigma which frames the book: an ostensibly antic affair regarding the narrator’s mother, once a well-regarded celebrity chef whose career was halted many years ago when she was photographed outside her house smeared in blood. Whose blood? What happened?

Like many of the memoirs, essays and novels concerning motherhood that have been published in the last decade, Bad Art Mother reaches beyond the reductive ideals of good and bad mothering that have, I imagine, always plagued mothers.