Peter Polites Peter Polites earns minimum wage and has written two novels: Down the Hume (2017) and The Pillars (2019). All essays by Peter Polites Essay: Peter Politeson Medea Mama becomes Medea I’ve always preferred Medea. I love her unhinged at the breakup of her relationship and then her transformation in the second act into the terrifying producer of her own drama. I imagine my mother as Medea, her waist-long hair jet black and shiny. Mar. 2020 • Memoir All essays featuring Peter Polites Emerging Critics 2020 Review: Cher Tanon Peter Polites The Pillars by Peter Polites Hachette 272pp Published July 2019 ISBN 9780733640186 Good Migrant/Bad Migrant In both Down The Hume and The Pillars, there are none of those happy endings that cheerfully bridge the challenges of multicultural existence. Characters from down-and-out circumstances don’t eventually triumph over their difficulties. Instead, by portraying characters who don’t represent easy moral positions, Polites’ work annihilates the assimilationist fantasy of ‘togetherness’ that is so often parroted in liberal discourse, and the fallacy that disenfranchised people are automatically ‘good’ or innocent. Sep. 2020 • Australian literature • Fiction • Emerging Critics 2020 Review: Dion Kaganon Western Sydney noir Down the Hume by Peter Polites Hachette Australia 272pp $27.99 AU Published February, 2017 ISBN 9780733635564 Nursing Grievances: Neoliberal Noir in Peter Polites’ Down the Hume Noir has long offered a space for airing working-class grievances, and for smuggling in queer and feminist subtexts. What, then, does noir do for contemporary Western Sydney, and what can it do for the children of migrants and working-class queers in Australia? May. 2018 • Australian literature • Fiction • Place • Sydney • Western Sydney Essay: Maxine Beneba Clarkeon #Three Jerks Under New Management The voices and stories of Ahmad, Polites and Carman work incredibly well together to create an interwoven picture of the lives of these young men in the suburbs of their youth. In this respect, Three Jerks cuts through the homogeneity of media images by introducing us to characters from distinctly different backgrounds, occupying the same streets and engaging in different ways. Jun. 2014 • Place • Sydney • Western Sydney