May Ngo

Sharpening Sentences

Moving Up

And I think this is where I was previously mistaken. I thought Strout’s books are about class, and they are, but in a much more specific sense – they are really about social mobility.

The Scaffold Falls Away

Lemon begins like a conventional crime novel – there’s a detective interrogating a suspect, trying to pin the murder of a young woman onto an obviously vulnerable young man.

See You At The DMZ

We can view Don Mee Choi as a kind of bricoleur in DMZ Colony; a quilt maker, image assembler, improviser, who uses multiple tools – research, fiction, memoir – to assemble the beginnings of an archive.

Safe Havens

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 n...

Making Craft Conscious

Salesses asks what forms of fiction writing, and hence ways of being in the world, are marginalised in conventional understandings of craft? Conversely, how do different ways of being in the world – that is, not being part of the culturally domina...

Precarious Fairy Tales

Like many fairy tales that are about coming of age, this novel also explores girlhood, but a girlhood that is indelibly formed by race and most of all — by class.

Shopping Night

Growing up, I saw negative media depictions of Asians and migrants and I didn’t want to be lumped into the same category as them. I didn’t want to confront questions of race and belonging. I didn’t want to examine my identity and culture, particul...