Non-fiction

One of the pleasures of this book is that it introduces you to artists whose work you may not know very much about; another is to read Daniel Thomas on artists whose work you do know and love.

Like Murphy’s, my heart is housed in a body that is judged for being ill-mannered or slow when I cannot hear people speaking to me, and like her, the architecture of the culture through which we move causes me immense stress. My life story, like hers, is affected by the movement and stillness of hammer, anvil and stirrup – and indeed these three tiny bones caused our lives to intertwine.

As social life becomes increasingly mediated by digital tools, it is ever more imperative to understand how people incorporate technology into their routines, as well as how technologies spark new forms of engagement, identity, and interaction.

Anwen Crawford’s remarkable new work of non-fiction, No Document, is many kinds of document, but one of the ways it can be read is as an attempt to discover a form of writing fit for ephemeral art practices – especially as those practices relate to, or become bound up with, experiences of vulnerability, pain, and mortality.

Mark Mordue’s compelling biography asserts that Nick Cave’s self-mythology is a product of both genuine artistic obsessions, and of the networks of friends and family uniquely equipped to guide and nurture them.

Lentin’s objective in Why Race Still Matters is to provide analytic tools that foster anti-racist struggles and encourage coalitional politics. She insists that race still matters because race is still a structure of domination that produces misery and inequality. She tells us that race still matters because racists still exist. And she articulates the value of an epistemology that foregrounds the standpoint of those who experience racism without slipping uncritically into a performance of deference that fragments collectivity. Why Race Still Matters is a vital book for those who wish to understand race, and more importantly, desire to make it matter less.

She was in full possession of her craft from the very start; The Transit of Venus amounts to a general mobilisation of literary resources that were already present, but not yet fully evident, in the earlier stories.

Each of the editors in Literary Lion Tamers was successful in large part because of their ability to persuade authors to be published by them and, then to convince readers to buy their books.

We are edging unsteadily out of the pandemic, into the rainstorm, into a world in which we might, finally, be able to hug with abandon. Fire, Flood, Plague, and others like it, have magnified voices that speak to the inequities of Australian society.

What we missed told us something about what we are: not the calculating units of neoliberal legend, but social beings first and foremost, whose sociality – whose embodied sociality – is the precondition of our individuality. We missed each other, in other words.