What could a real collaborative process look like in a landscape where colonial injustices never ended, and just continued under different names? How could a non-indigenous filmmaking team walk into such an unequal playing field, and effectively give the power back to the communities who never ceded their lands? This is how.

Michalia Arathimos reviews new work by Laura Elvery, Hannelore Cayre and C Pam Zhang.

Michalia Arathimos reviews new work by Bernadine Evaristo, Luke Horton, Abi Daré, Imbi Neeme and Kirsten Krauth.

Michalia Arathimos reviews new books by Christos Tsiolkas, Amanda Niehaus, Vivian Pham, Mandy Beaumont and Laura McPhee-Browne.

New books by Huo Yan, Ruby Porter, Mariana Dimópulos, Anna Krien and the Gay’Wu Group of Women reviewed by Michalia Arathimos.

As wild and genre-bending and hellacious as her prose is, though, Emanuel’s novel can be placed alongside things we have read: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Samuel Beckett’s body of work, and, more locally, Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose. But while Cox’s debut was lauded in the Guardian and the Saturday Paper, described variously as exciting, original, and brilliant, critical responses to Emanuel seem strangely subdued.

We think of sex as primordial and innate, but it is both the target of market strategies and highly mediated. The inventions of virtual reality, sexbots and RealDolls have broad implications. Dick pics, sexting, Tinder and Grindr have revolutionised the hook-up and, by extension, our sexual moralities.

Koraly Dimitriadis hails from a strict Greek Orthodox migrant background and her work is a consistent and vividly burning ‘fuck you’ to tradition, to repression, and to the idea that we must accept the roles allotted us with strangled fortitude. If Dimitriadis’ narrative contains a recommendation it is that we get the hell out of there, wherever the oppressive there might be, and emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

Australian letters is like a microcosm of Australia itself: culturally diverse, politically varied across different states, tense and conflicted or humorous or affecting in turn. If there is one thing we may say about our literatures it is that there is a common thread of darkness underneath. Whether that thread references an unvoiced violence or subsumed toxic masculinities, or a wilfully forgotten colonial past, it is traceable in much of our writing, especially in the short story form.

An activist in the 1970s, Desmond spent years working and living with ‘gang women’ in New Zealand. Trust was an attempt to tell their stories ethically. It didn’t shy away from intersections of class, race, economic disempowerment and violence. Her second book turns the lens on subject matter more personally hazardous, and no less ethically fraught.

This book is a glowing accomplishment, scathing and funny and apt in its lambasting of well-meaning Australians, so good it is atrocious. We can’t help but laugh along with de Kretser, just like we can’t help but ugly-sob when she rips her character’s lives apart at the seams. You might feel uncomfortably implicated somewhere along the line, but soon you realise the joke is not only on the tolerant, but on everyone. The lightness of the prose carries us into desolate landscapes, but we are never dismayed, only moved.

Our heroine is Acker, who is tattooed, shaven-headed, a dissector of old books (literally – she chops them up). At first we take her for an advocate for victims of domestic violence, but nothing in this text is that straightforward. How, Wright asks, could we ever resolve the debt we all owe to the unfairly dead?

On 15 October 2007, my partner was arrested for terrorism. This came as a shock, as I hadn’t been aware of any nefarious activities. This sense of disbelief continued in the years that followed, during which we hoped the charges would be dropped and my partner would avoid prison.

There is much to like in this retelling. Medea, a figure who enacts vengeance on her husband, comes to life on the page as a woman struggling not just to voice herself, but to have any agency at all. We meet her on the deck of the Argo, as she tears parts off the brother she has just murdered, scattering them into the sea. This aspect of the book dances right on the line between justified and gratuitous violence. But despite the rugged brutality, it is Vann’s language that is the true innovation.

Kneen’s work is clever, metafictional and highly affecting. In this work nothing ‘niche’ about Kneen is toned down or apologetic; we have the identity politics, the questioning of social mores, and the joyful visceral fucking. It is sexy, but it’s also a scathing critique of the arbitrariness of gender, a treatise on the power politics of sex, and an exploration on what our technologies might do for us in a decidedly dystopian future.

New author Gina Cole bursts onto the Pacific writing scene with this absurdly good collection of short stories. Cole’s work has been described as Fijian infused, queer-inflected, and part of the Pasifika diaspora. But here is an author who refuses to be pigeonholed. Nuanced and sophisticated, Cole’s book challenges the idea that a cultural ‘other’ may only be one thing.

Grace was the first Māori woman to publish a collection of short stories in 1975. Her work melds a distinctive approach to time, space and the spiritual with the political difficulties of being Māori in a predominantly white world.

Slavoj Žižek said that this book taught him what kind of person he really wanted to be. This book did not teach me who I want to be – but it did remind me again what literature may be capable of when it is wielded with a hideous, honest brutality, like an executioner’s sword.

But what the collection also reveals is the high level of craftsmanship and dexterity present in Australian writing today. Varied, affecting, and always containing some unexpected twist, many of these stories explore dark subject matter without being overwhelmed by it.