Fiction

The vague terms ‘experimental’ and ‘avant garde’, which are routinely applied to Quin, convey something of her striking originality, but not the depth and perspicacity of her work.

Her vision and writing of the female experience is curious and expansive, conveyed as it is through these short fictions that take in the messiness of life and arbitrariness of death.

How do writers like Maguire integrate scientific details and ideas into their books so that the reader’s experience is smooth and unimpeded? And why is it important that they do?

You like the idea of going back and choosing a better path, or at least a fresh one. But, as you read Intan Paramaditha’s The Wandering and make choices within it, you feel heavy with apprehension wrought from experience. Do different decisions lead to a different you?

The best of the stories in Hold Your Fire are those which combine the keenness of Wilson’s perception with a sense of narrative containment.

Tony Birch tells incredibly important stories incredibly well and Dark as Last Night is both an antidote and a lullaby in pandemic times.

One of the challenges in trying to describe what goes on in this story is that so much takes place in the interstitial spaces, the breach between what happens and what can be said about it – even what can be remembered.

Like many fairy tales that are about coming of age, this novel also explores girlhood, but a girlhood that is indelibly formed by race and most of all — by class.

Story by story, what emerges is a belonging to Country, one which is grounded in knowing and in knowledge.

6 JANUARY 2021. A nondescript room in the US Capitol Building. A Confederate flag is planted in a bin in the corner. Beside it is the flag of the Republic of Vietnam, three horizontal red stripes on a yellow field. Three young men stand around a book on the floor. They each have their phones out, cameras facing each other.