Read an edited extract from Abbas El-Zein’s memoir Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars out now. Published with permission from the author and Upswell Publishing.

From recycled textiles to photosynthetic sweaters, fashion has ostensibly committed itself to sustainability. But is it more than a passing trend? Reviewing Clare Press’ Wear Next, Carody Culver considers the complexities of both defining fashion and imagining the industry’s future.

Luke Carman reviews Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, a translated novel depicting a linguist’s experience of psychosis and institutionalisation. As Carman argues, the novel’s distinctively ‘minimalist’ style underlines ‘a contingent relationship to sanity’ to which we are all vulnerable.

About three-quarters through Acrobat Music: New & Selected Poems, Jill Jones nudges the reader knowingly in the ribs. ‘Difficult Poem’…

Since the 1980s, fiction has become big business. In her review of Dan Sinykin’s wide-ranging study of American publishing, Alice Grundy argues for the importance of the demythologising effects of Sinykin’s institutionalist approach for both literary scholarship and industrial relations.

In her review of Jennifer Croft’s new novel, Alice Whitmore unearths the hidden correspondences between the fungal kingdom and the world of translation.

What makes sentient machines tick? In a review of Lorraine Daston’s ‘Rules’, Nicholas Heron traces the history of the algorithm, showing that at stake in the age of AI is our very understanding of rationality.

Through a reading of Jane Carey’s historical study, Jessica White tracks the paths made by Australian women through the settler academy in the ardent pursuit of science.

Mindy Gill parses the influence of George Eliot on Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, The Fraud – a capacious and non-linear work, the pluralistic ambition of which has put critics ‘off-balance’

Drawing on the insights of two new books of literary criticism, Joshua Barnes argues that recent developments, such as the rise of autofiction, should serve to remind us that the novel, fiction, and realism are distinct categories despite their historical convergence.

In her final essay, literary scholar Sneja Gunew (1946–2024) explores the affective dimensions of migrant writers’ transit between languages, capping a lifetime’s advocacy for those whose participation in the national culture ‘is grounded in their differences’. We present a lightly edited version of this essay with reflections on Gunew’s life and work by Ivor Indyk and Eda Gunaydin.

Lucy Van reviews π.O.’s The Tour, a pugnacious verse chronicle of a poetic caper around the United States. From his dirty t-shirt to his dissatisfactions with American food, π.O.’s emblematic gestures of refusal characterise a volume that, for Van, exposes ‘the orders and disorders of our national poetry’.

In her review of two recent books on Palestine, Micaela Sahhar draws on her family history and experience as a scholar to examine the case for academic boycott and the limitations of the Western liberal mindset for Palestinian allyship.

Reading Palestine through South American literary and political history, Yumna Kassab reflects on the potency of symbols during times of repression.

While few literary translators are truly ‘anonymous’ these days, many still move like ghosts through the world of publishing, their names omitted not only from the covers of their books but also the reviews and promotional materials that sprout around them.

Jeanine Leane gets under the skin of the diversity and inclusion mythscape in creative writing programs.

Malouf’s commitment to possibility and multiplicity is well known. It is part of a larger belief in transformation, in metamorphosis, as the founding power of the imagination, its ability to create or divine worlds within or beyond the one we live in, and through language, to populate those worlds and make them familiar. The ability to move between forms of writing is, in a sense, an expression of this commitment to a multiple view of things, though that is not the only explanation.

History runs in parallel tracks: there is the way things have been told, and the way things were. As in: not colonised, but civilised. And to be made civil, to be made ‘adequate in courtesy and politeness’, as Merriam-Webster defines it, makes it sound like a favour. Language obfuscates. It’s a way of controlling the narrative, forcing the eye into a narrow aperture. A single perspective becomes the singular perspective, which is how colonial literature came to skew mainstream cultural understandings of that period. Mirandi Riwoe seems determined to widen that aperture and, then, to shift the perspective entirely.

The longer I spent with these essays, the more I enjoyed the connections Berry creates between humans and nonhuman animals in real life, their diffusion into products for human consumption, and their symbolism.