Publishing

When it comes to access, everyone is becoming ~Radical~ these days. I’ve noticed

Doing everything you can to expunge trans women from women’s sport or from being included in talking about anti-violence against women will never make women’s sport fairer, or decrease violence, or give cis-women one ounce of what they need. Divided we ensure that the real problem, the systemic underfunding and relegation of women’s health, culture and sport remains a secondary concern.

The suggestion to ‘turn to the voices and perspectives of non-white writers, comedians and politicians’ as a corrector to white privilege, shines light on the relative absence of those with no access to the media at all and whose everyday struggles are much more indicative of what antiracism in practice really looks like.

In the history of Black authors writing in French – and in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s new novel, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt – it turns out that authorship matters very much.

To call into question the literary value of Dalton’s fiction is not to disqualify the pleasure and imaginative release that hundreds of thousands of readers have found in his novels, especially Boy Swallows Universe; it is to take that popularity seriously.

How alienating, how jarring, to be made aware that you’re one step away from a cascading world of ones and zeros instead of live, decaying art objects. Get free of queues and tickets and blood-sugar crashes, but can’t shake the feeling that a high-quality colour book reproduction would offer a superior form of viewing. Wonder if Walter Benjamin could have dreamed of such a flaccid form of artistic replication as a virtual gallery tour.

Fryer Library at the University of Queensland is one of my favourite places. Compared with the cathedral-like reading rooms of the British Library or Sydney’s Mitchell Library, the scale of Fryer is much more welcoming, with portraits of writers from the collection gracing the walls: Peter Carey in a Hawaiian shirt perhaps – or a pugnacious Xavier Herbert glaring at the artist.

While few literary translators are truly ‘anonymous’ these days, many still move like ghosts through the world of publishing, their names omitted not only from the covers of their books but also the reviews and promotional materials that sprout around them.

It was at that moment that I knew the newsletter had crossed over from a curious experiment into a practice that was integral to who I was as a writer.

What makes a book distinct from a meme if both are dependent on a web of intertextual references, some of which are digital and some which rely on the printed page?