By this author
Culture October 12, 2019
Grand Union
In the short story “Sentimental Education”, Monica, a 19-year-old university student, asks her lover to flip his language around when discussing sex. She tells him: “In a matriarchy, you’d hear women boasting to their mates: ‘I subsumed him …
Culture May 11, 2019
On David Malouf
“School, as everyone knows, is where books go to get sterilised,” writes Nam Le in his essay On David Malouf, part of Black Inc’s “Writers on Writers” series. But if a classroom can sound the death knell for a love of literature, Le …
Culture June 15, 2019
This Excellent Machine
About a third of the way through This Excellent Machine, its teenage protagonist, Clem, finds himself in a cafe on the wrong side of town. This is a place where the footpaths are black, because “they’d waited too long to hose down the vomit”. …
Culture March 23, 2019
Exploded View
Road trips, as epitomised by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, can be a way to unfetter and unbind. Not in Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View, though, where a car is described as little more than a “moving coffin”. In 1970s Australia, …
