AustLit

'There was a time when a selection of essays, sketches, reviews and speeches by David Marr would have seemed less necessary than it does now. From his rookie days at The Bulletin onwards, Marr was one of those figures who seemed to speak for and to the broad and thoughtful Australian middle class. He served as an ordinary oracle for the constitutional liberalism and decency of the majority. The man reflected, though in more elegant prose than was perhaps deserved, just who we were as a people.' (Introduction)

'Fiona Wright’s second collection of essays, the follow-up to 2015’s superb Small Acts of Disappearance, is concerned with dark matter. Not the invisible stuff that makes up most of our universe, but those hidden parts of human life made from particles of habit.'  (Introduction)

'Of all the titles in Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series, Ceridwen Dovey’s essay on J. M. Coetzee arrives with the most intellectual excitement, as well as the greatest anticipatory unease. This is because Coetzee – two-time winner of the Booker Prize, recipient of the Nobel, the most august literary figure to hold an Australian passport since the death of Patrick White – is also notoriously cool, aloof and reticent about the meaning and nature of his work. How to connect with such a man?'  (Introduction)

'The greatest deliberate loss of American civilian life in modern times before the fall of the Twin Towers took place in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. On that day, 918 people, including 304 children, were ordered to drink grape-flavoured cordial from a metal tub laced with cyanide, chloral hydrate, Valium and Phenergan – that or commit suicide by alternative means – at the order of the Reverend Jim Jones, to whose apocalyptic cult they all belonged.' (Introduction)

'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 kick-arse post-punk Spotify playlist, even if its experimental bent and high intellectual ambitions leave you otherwise nonplussed.'  (Introduction)

'Axiomatic is the fourth work of nonfiction by Maria Tumarkin, one of Australia’s most urgent and necessary writers, but it is the first to keep her accent – the first to fully register the impolitic intensity of her prose and breadth of her world view. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also her best.' (Introduction)

'The education of the artist, especially if that artist is a young male, is the perennial grass of the literary field: a yearly recurrence, reassuring if often a little dull. Must we really hear again of the sensitive soul who finds himself in a homosocial world without sympathetic allies? Who longs for connection with women without having the first clue about doing so? Whose aesthete’s impulses place him at odds with family, religion or caste?' (Introduction)