Reviewed: Angela Williams, Snakes and Ladders, Affirm Press Power is inflicted and fortified at every social rim, forcing an exhausting battle on those on the back foot. Some will get out. Others will get by. The fight will feel futile at times, with small triumphs along the way. Most will continue to rise each day, thrust among the systemic tide, putting one foot in front of the other. Angela Williams’ memoir Snakes and Ladders is ...
Read More

Reviewed: Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor, Culture Is Bad for You: Inequality in the cultural and creative industries, Manchester University Press Brian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor’s new book certainly has an arresting title. Culture Is Bad for You, it proclaims. For a certain type of person—perhaps the sort of person who reads Meanjin—the statement will be provocative, even enraging. For years the idea of ‘culture’—as well as its sexier synonyms such ...
Read More

Reviewed: Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley, MCD Books The ‘self-made boy genius’ is a pervasive image in the tech world. It’s a familiar trajectory, made admirable by its sheer exceptionality: young, brilliant yet maladjusted man floats around in society unsure of his motivations, drops out of university and teaches himself how to code, then stumbles upon a cool new business idea that becomes a game-changer. Venture capital flows in hot and heavy; there’s a strong conviction that ...
Read More

Reviewed: Doomsday Clock series, DC Comics In the first issue of the four-part Before Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan series, released in 2012, Manhattan muses on the philosophical implications of the regularly misunderstood Schrödinger’s Cat experiment. ‘Boxes contain mysteries,’ Manhattan explains. ‘Boxes are mysteries. Until we open them, we can never really be sure what’s inside.’ Doomsday Clock is Geoff Johns, Gary Frank and Brad Anderson’s sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ ground-breaking 1986 series Watchmen ...
Read More

Reviewed: Christos Tsiolkas, Damascus, Allen & Unwin, 2019 In an interview that followed the publication of his 2013 novel Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas declared that he ‘learnt to feel Australian by travelling to Europe’.¹ It’s a sentiment perhaps best expressed in Dead Europe (2005), a novel in which to be Australian is repeatedly compared to naivety or childishness. Such expressions suggest that for Tsiolkas, we can only understand Australian national identity in relief, an idea hearkening ...
Read More

Reviewed: Robert Harris, The Gang of One: Selected Poems, ed. Judith Beveridge, Grand Parade Poets, 224 pp.; L.K. Holt, Birth Plan, Vagabond Press, 96 pp.; Lisa Gorton, Empirical, Giramondo, 84 pp.; Emma Lew, Crow College: New and Selected Poems, Giramondo, 122 pp. In 2017 Alan Wearne quite rightly decided that the work of Robert Harris deserved to be more widely available than through a scattering of individual volumes, and crowd-sourced funding for a selected—which may ...
Read More

Reviewed: Rachel Buchanan, Ko Taranaki Te Maunga: Knowledge Beats Shame, BWB Texts, 2019 When I was a child, Taranaki, in the North Island’s south-west, was a magical place. My grandmother lived there, in a small town called Hāwera, right in the middle of the region’s farming heartland. On our yearly trips north from our home in the deep frigid south, her little garden seemed practically tropical: a pervasive, steamy, lush warmth, the air muggy with ...
Read More

Reviewed: Colin Varney, Earworm, Margaret River Press, 2018 Unusual narrators in fiction demonstrate how a willing suspension of disbelief touches every aspect of the reading experience. After a few pages of Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, we are reconciled to the fact that the narrator is a foetus. In Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector, we grow comfortable under the guidance of a narrator that is a 6000-year-old Mesopotamian bowl. Likewise, in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, we ...
Read More