Books

Reviewed: Margery Kempe, Robert Glück, NYRB In the final chapter of Margery Kempe, Robert Glück reduces his novel to four words: ‘Exult, exasperate, abandon, amaze.’ (Italics his.) This is no spoiler. These words appear repeatedly throughout the novel as anchors, suspending ...

In Uses for Obsession, Shewry balances intensity and submission with a casual style that welcomes you in with a big hard grin ...

Signs of Damage joins a lineage of Australian commercial fiction that makes for a snappy media release; the kind seemingly engineered to inspire ‘lively discussion’ in a book club ...

At its core, Small Rain is an interrogation of value ...

Ambitious and atmospheric, Salvage is let down by heavy-handed characterisations and a trope-heavy ending ...

Rawson has written one of the better human perspectives on the realities of nature ...

I Ate The Whole World To Find You is an impressive offering that demands attention ...

In The Theory of Everything, Yumna Kassab uses sweeping narratives to describe the minutiae and capture what looms large ...

‘You know Melbourne was at one stage slated to go by the name of Batman. We’d be Batmanians by now.’ ...

When people break from their everyday routines, something unresolved or unwanted often emerges ...

There are certain things I grew up knowing so intimately that I never recall having learned them. One of the deepest of these, the oldest, is the idea that to express too much emotion, to be too much, is ...

Reviewed: Parade, Rachel Cusk, Faber In 1929, Virginia Woolf reflected in A Room of One’s Own that ‘all the older forms of literature were hardened and set’ by the time women became writers. She then argued that in a literary tradition ...

Reviewed: Blackouts, Justin Torres, Granta Picture the hoodlum homosexual Jean Genet leafing through Magnus Hirschfeld’s archive; Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten collaborating on a mixed-media zine; Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin linking up for a gossip sesh. These speculative imaginings ...

Reviewed: Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin, Vintage Trigger warning: pregnancy loss What is there to be said about feminist art from the 1970s that a generation of feminist art historians and scholars haven’t already said? Why write a second-wave feminism book ...

Meanjin writers share their favourite books of 2024 ...