culture

Thirty-year-old Melburnian Kimberly Leamy leads a quiet life. She lives alone in a Coburg apartment and drives to a local TAFE at night where she teaches photography. One rainy evening between classes, Kim is approached by James Finn, a stranger who...

The UTS Writers’ Anthology sits on an interesting precipice, one no less interesting because it sits there with such grace and style. On the one hand, it’s the outcome of a learning and teaching project; the yearly editorial committee is composed of...

Sharon Kernot’s fourth book contains many sweet, darkly beguiling set pieces, which evoke in their way a sense of the beauty that can be seen in nearly anything living or dead. In the opening pages we meet two girls about 11 years old. One of them...

Antidote to a Curse , the first novel of the Maltese–Australian James Cristina, is an ambitious debut. It is excitingly difficult to classify. It is an erotic story and an international mystery. It is a celebration of Melbourne – with references to...

Introducing They Cannot Take the Sky , a collection of testimonies from people in detention on Manus and Nauru, Christos Tsiolkas wrote of the intellectual abstraction necessary to make refugees’ futures fodder for public debate: “We forget that the...

Does Truman Capote belong to the history of literature or the history of celebrity? Both, of course. The man who imposed himself upon the world as an orchid of graciousness and grotesquerie is a legend in himself, and as the author of Breakfast at...

Poetry and comedy meet in Ali Whitelock’s poetry collection and my heart crumples like a coke can . As in a stand-up routine, these poems offer sharp social observation, frankness played for laughs and nourishing doses of swearing. And as with the...

A critic once wrote of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that a close reading of the novel would yield, if nothing else, a recipe for raspberry jam. A similarly intimate engagement with Anthony Uhlmann’s ambitious fictional debut offers the potential for a...

Roxane Gay is well known as a social commentator and writer of nonfiction. She is the author of Bad Feminist , a book of essays advocating an intersectional feminism, and of the memoir Hunger , which reveals her gang rape at age 12 as the trigger...