Fiction

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.

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.

The record store clerk, like the pop critic, was once a messenger: have you heard this? Have you heard this? You have to hear this.

I am looking for something to say about the short story as a category, something to distinguish it, and my mind alights on the word ‘fun’.

In Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever, tiny comets blaze across the pages. Connecting disparate histories, their orbits disrupt the order of…

Reading expands the mind, and when you’ve got weak personal boundaries it can be as wild and dangerous an experience as living.

In both books, the aspiration – to be the Asian actor who makes it big – is quickly diminished by the reality. It’s another version of the model minority myth, where even if you win, there’s an element of losing.

7 ½ is a manifesto of Tsiolkas’s evolved ideas about art, and a testimony to the lived experience of the past two years. At its core, it is concerned simultaneously to sketch the blind cruelty of global disaster and to find and celebrate the beauty and joy in the ordinary simplicity of everyday life.

‘Stories of Aboriginal heroism (like that of Yarri and Jacky Jacky) are not new. In fact, our oldest stories tell of characters of high esteem, knowledge, and courage.’

In a genre dominated by US and UK authors, the addition of another Australian perspective to the campus novel conversation is welcome.