Non-fiction

Tolstoy Together isn’t meant to be a standalone book but a companion to War and Peace, a prolonged conference of avid reading minds, a guidebook not for pre-reading but for reinforcement of the distributed memories shared among the travellers after each day’s exploration.

This difference between Sparrow and many other progressive commentators has been demonstrated recently in his nuanced coverage of pandemic politics, of the left assent to hyperinflated surveillance and policing power, and the class-element that comes embedded in Covid-19 policy responses. He clearly retains a strong belief that minds can be changed through engagement, empathy, well-reasoned argumentation, and, most importantly, material support for people’s wellbeing.

‘This idea of difference, reinforcing difference through representation, and how this relates to social power, is what I want to use this book as an opportunity to think more about.’

We continue to study and dance and sing and eat in order that we might remind each other of our own incompleteness and continue to assemble again and again and again. Or we make a mixtape so that we might feel the intensity of pleasure, and in doing so find our way back to the principle of incompletion – a small reminder that undercommon sociality cannot be stilled by enclosure of flesh and land that is the imposition of private property.

How Australia and much of the West discusses and reports on Israel/Palestine, compared to other conflicts, goes to the heart of Western chauvinism.

Born in 1890, the second youngest of eight children, Alexander Hugh Chisholm grew up in Maryborough in the goldfields region north-west of Melbourne. He was unhappy at school and often cut classes, to follow, as he put it, the lure of the bush. At first he had no books and no adequate language for the charm of birds, their colours and shapes, their vocal range, nests and eggs, and he invented his own names for them.

We need stories like Borderline to help us see the devastating psychological effects that the growing rates of incarceration will inevitably have on yet another generation of young people.

My initial impression of Van Badham’s new book was hardly affirmative. On its cover, the words QAnon and On are…

The rush to push out COVID literature and thinkpieces is troubling, if only because surely the pandemic has taught us the value of slowing down, of being wary of endless production in all its forms. Surely, the pandemic should have taught us, if nothing else, to take time, if we are privileged enough to be able to do so. Yet I write this knowing about the economic necessity to write – this review is also, in a literal sense, born out of economic necessity.

I suspect that most decisions about whether to break a luxury shop window, tip over a police car, or sabotage an oil refinery are not made in books, but in the gut.