Public Books Partner
Sydney Review of Books
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange an ongoing series of essays with international concerns.
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On Not Asking “Should I Insert Myself in the Text?”
“We are obliged to acknowledge what we see and how we organize what we see.”
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How To Scuttle A Public Broadcaster
On the 100th anniversary of the founding of the BBC, national public broadcasters across the world are still subject to constant spurious attacks.
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Taking Our Time: How Australian Universities Measure Academic Work
“Who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?”
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Mandy Sayer interviews Helen Garner, 1989
“We didn’t think of ourselves as hippies, we thought of ourselves as serious people with politics.”
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Ditching the “New Yorker” Voice
“What does it mean to self-narrate? What does self-insight look like?”
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My Certainty Shall Be Their Confusion
Ann Quin is, above all, a self-aware writer, with an ironic understanding of the limits of symbolic expression, who was nevertheless prepared to test those limits.
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The Ten Thousand Things
“I am supposed to be writing this essay, ostensibly on technology, but not for the first time, I believe I am unable to write; and not writing, doubt that I will I ever write again.”
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The Perspective Is the Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction is an attempt to grasp the underlying precariousness of our sense of identity and belonging.
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The Crumbling Tower
Academics are scrambling to fulfill the increasingly bureaucratic research measures of the neoliberal university.
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Pencil Leaners
The collective ventures of the Federal Writers’ Project force us to think about how writing might be reinvented in the context of economic crisis.
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Mother Courage
The summer I turned 17, in the springboard pause between high school and university, I began working as a nurse aide in the geriatric rest home and hospital run by my mother.
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Caught Mapping
The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives.
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The Necessity of an Alternative
Margaret Thatcher made her notorious claim that there is “no such thing as society” in an interview with Women’s Own magazine published in …
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Raise Your Needles: In Defence of Public Knitting
It was a triumph bagging the last table on the busy rooftop bar, especially so late …
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Temporal Lines
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns. Today’s article, “Temporal Lines: An Interview with Pedro Mairal, Samanta Schweblin, Fabian Martinez,” by …
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Goodbye to All That: The End of Neoliberalism?
For Richard Denniss, the evolution of the Australian War Memorial into a giant billboard illustrates the logic of neoliberalism, something that, he says …
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Bleached Atmospheres of Dread
Myles McRae MLA was a monster of male entitlement. Any person who read the Australian newspapers in the year 1891 would have thought so. Six feet tall …
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A History of Reading: Alan Marshall and Helen Keller
On May 9, 1933, the day before the Nazis burned her book as part of their action …
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Women Who Write About Their Feelings and Lives
Two recent memoirs by women who grew up in “sexually liberated” 1970s artistic Australia present a sobering picture: of predatory and violent men whose …
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Signs and Wonders
I’m walking to Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair in Sydney’s Domain at high tide, scanning the small bay in Woolloomooloo, as I always do, for fish or stingrays. There’s nothing to see in the flat green water nudging the sandstone cliffs …
