Fiction

Iris reconsiders our official, public-record history – its absences and silences, its misshapings and misrecognitions. And it also offers a reconsideration of a woman whose position within this history is complicated, doubly, by her queerness.

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.

The novel does not unfold so much as it crawls – the way a bot can run through two hundred password combinations a second: by failing again and failing better.