A collection of 27 posts
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s latest novel is a heavy-handed parable designed to show that Islamist radicalisation in Australia is merely a myth invented by a racist establishment. In the wake of the Bondi shooting, this seems less believable than ever.
A critical look at how well-intentioned editorial “sensitivity” can narrow creative risk-taking and homogenise contemporary fiction.
‘Ragtime,’ E.L. Doctorow’s forgotten novel of Progressive Era New York, is a reminder of how much American politics have changed over the past century.
Chimamanda Adichie’s new novel is refreshingly defiant of liberal orthodoxies.
Alexandre Dumas’s novel is by turns an adventure story, a paean to bourgeois values, and a Greek epic. No wonder it continues to fascinate.
South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang’s literary experimentation thwarts rather than advances her professed concern for the suffering of everyone, everywhere, all the time.
The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world.
The themes of Liu Cixin’s trilogy undermine his protestations of loyalty to the People’s Republic.
1900–1950 was a golden age of literary eccentricity.
“It’s a sin to want to die for a nation.”
If truth is the first casualty of war, then perhaps good fiction is the first casualty of culture war.
Fiction writers are used to working in lonely isolation. Maybe that’s why the stories they’ve written about the pandemic seem so out of touch
And it turns out that she was, because despite the best efforts of her critics, she hasn’t yet been truly cancelled.
If you haven’t seen Endgame yet—or if you take comfort in the delusion that Marvel is “woke”—stop reading now.