Catriona Menzies-Pike

Enemies of Goodness

Do ‘viral’ essays still hold up in print? Catriona Menzies-Pike considers the recent books of two critics – Lauren Oyler and Becca Rothfeld – who forged their reputations in a digital literary culture whose channels of circulation are now closing....

Everything is Somehow Alike

Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld proposes to examine what happens to aesthetic experience in a culture dominated by algorithms. Reviewing Chayka’s book, Catriona Menzies-Pike finds its solutions flawed yet indicative of our wider structural blindspots.

As Pluck Would Have It 

What do Barbie and the Oxford English Dictionary have in common? In this review of Pip Williams’ fiction, Catriona Menzies-Pike catalogues the tropes by which popular feminism sells women short.

Fool's Gold

In the blurb-saturated present, authors can decry blurbs as corrupt and silly all they like. When they publish new books, however, they will still be obliged to solicit blurbs, and most will provide them for friends and colleagues on request.

Only Feelings

Critic Swallows Book

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

A Fluctuating Charm: An Uncertain Grace

An Uncertain Grace is a strange, daring and clever novel and Kneen’s openness to connections that many other novelists never dream of making is exhilarating. Her characters wreck themselves with sex and science as they seek ways to live with extin...

Pick Your Own Misadventure: Avalanche by Julia Leigh

James Bradley: Fitting the Pieces Together

‘Although it looks like you write one book and then another and then another, the reality is much messier than that, and the books are really part of a larger process that’s surprisingly difficult to understand when you’re in the middle of it.’ Ja...

Writing, Editing: An Interview with Ellen van Neerven

‘I think Indigenous writers kind of need each other. I feel that more and more, that sense of camaraderie and community. We challenge each other to write better. It is sometimes hard when you’re perhaps the only black writer on a festival or you’r...

Sofie Laguna: ‘There Is No Reader In The Room’

‘I am meant to be a writer– but it is the actor in me who writes. What I mean by that is that I joyfully inhabit the voice of a character as if I’m playing that character.’ Miles Franklin winner Sofie Laguna speaks to the SRB about her fiction an