Oliver Reeson

Seeking Derangement

In her presentation of Anja, Howell has fallen into a contemporary trap, which is to presume that in modern literature a woman losing it is inherently understandable. That to shoulder a great emotional burden makes a female character three-dimensi...

A Kind of Truth

I started Chilean Poet just before Christmas while I was visiting my family in Brisbane and then I finished it during the first days of the new year, while I was ferociously coming down. It was life-affirming and glorious and gently wise and I lov...

A Communal Genre

I don’t think good queer memoir needs to have a didactic relationship to ideological representation. But there is, here, a more sophisticated understanding of representation than we’ve seen in Australian memoir recently. It can be important and ne...

Hypocrisy, bruh!

Notness

'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.'

The Body Problem

In Jennifer Mills’ The Airways, we travel through a series of bodies. The we here is us, the readers, but we share this journey with something else too – a ghost, a consciousness, something that speaks and thinks and feels but isn’t necessarily a

Not Who But How

I quite often like, or at least find satisfaction in being bullied, vilified, and made uncomfortable by a book. I have a life!