culture

“I’m not your fucking Uncle and I’m not a fucking Elder.” Aboriginal activist and historian Gary Foley doesn’t take kindly to being pigeonholed because of his seniority. A similar sentiment informs Radicals: Remembering the Sixties , which opens...

In the introductory chapter of A Swim in the Pond in the Rain , George Saunders describes what he has written as a “workbook”. It is a term, he says, that “kept coming to mind” as he was writing, and one that feels fitting because what has resulted...

Susan Johnson has written eight novels, a memoir and a nonfiction work. Her latest effort is a contemporary version of the epistolary book once popular in the 18th century. From Where I Fell is a narrative conducted entirely through online...

We’re not even halfway through the first page of this book before Jena Lin, former child prodigy, is in a chapel closet furiously banging a fellow musician she only vaguely knows. In her mind she doesn’t refer to him by name, just by instrument:...

There’s a strange elasticity of time at play in the latest issue of Meanjin , which seems fitting, perhaps, for the particular moment in which we find ourselves, unmoored from our regular habits and lives, newly conscious of our place in history...

Imbi Neeme’s The Spill is an engaging novel set in Western Australia that meditates upon the connections between memory, trauma and the imagination. Sweeping across four decades, the novel focuses on the lives of two sisters, Nicole and Samantha:...

In a white-dominated literary world, writing “the other” becomes a political act. This is, to put it lightly, unfortunate. Regardless, decades of omission have led to a reckoning in which writers of colour have carved out new spaces – those that...

Andrew Kwong’s memoir, One Bright Moon , recounts his family’s experiences under the first decades of Mao’s New China and their eventual escape, highlighting the everyday moments that underlie historical events. Public executions and famine are...

In the 1930s, as Robert Cutter, he sold more copies of “Hawaiian Paradise” than Bing Crosby. He performed before Katharine Hepburn and Clark Gable at the Academy Awards. He hadn’t quite finished divorcing his best friend’s sister when he fell for...