The relevance of the Radical Jewish Tradition today — and it is an urgent one — is not that it offers a guide to campaigning against antisemitism (though revealing this history is its great achievement); rather, it is that it reminds us on the value of working-class struggle.

The after of El Hassan’s afterlife is never merely an after, but rather is always becoming after. In her hands, the remains of plunder assert themselves as mobile “sites of memory” — to borrow a compelling term from the late Toni Morrison — activated  by a people, Palestinians, striving not to be erased from history.

The End of Capitalism is an important counterpoint to the technocentrist’s dream of an unbridled capitalism powered by the sun and the wind — not to mention an argosy of unproven green tech — rather than the remains of prehistoric plants and animals.

Wyld’s creation of voiceless-nameless-lifeless Blak people in The Echoes serves no narrative purpose. This novel is not truth-telling of invasion and occupation, and it does not envision justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Instead of rejecting or confronting lazy literary tropes and colonial-style narratives, the author has erased Blak voices, bodies, histories and futures, adding her own voice to a never-ending echo of white-gazed literature when silence would have been better.

Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this.

Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.

What strikes you as you wander through the galleries is not only the overtly political messaging of many of the works on display, but also the way that textile and fabric art makes visible the slow, quietly defiant labour of its creation, and gives form to the idea of solidarity across individuals and groups as a kind of weaving together.

By drawing out the cultures of indie porn, Stardust pushes readers to see beyond issues of content classification, aesthetics and representation to consider the political economy of pornography. She positions pornography within broader systems of economic inequality, trade relationships and globalisation, and frames indie porn in terms of its efforts to “redistribute power, labour, and wealth in global media production.”

As a poem attuned to form, embodiment, sensory experience and memory, van Neerven’s “Finger Limes” presents an intricate meditation on poetic sustenance and survival. Its riddling currents exemplify how poetry is not sustained along a linear axis but unfolds in eddies and counter currents.

Witnessing, reading through this absorbing, elegant, careful example of the art, is always a kind of mourning, and Conrad, an author for whom writing was “the conversion of nervous force into phrases,” is the perfect figure to focus Edmond’s ongoing work of mourning.

A Difficult Year misses the solution evident in its own story. Were it to look more closely, the film might challenge the weak political clichés it skewers with powerful truths: that those worried about the climate and their money have more in common than what divides them; that only a movement focused on ending both environmental and economic exploitation can defeat a politics with no interest in stopping either.

Masculinity is an important and controversial topic in gay discourse, and Invisible Boys should be celebrated as an excellent document of the phenomenon as lived in regional Australia. Yet I lamented the absence of an effeminate gay character in Sheppard’s macho universe. A character for whom painted nails might not have just been “a punk thing.

Political journalism follows scandal like a loyal dog. The Murray-Darling Basin is a gift to such an enterprise, breeding scandal and tragedy, windfall and downfall, wealthy abundance and mass ecological death.

In Indigenous Liberation & Socialism, historian and activist Jordan Humphreys probes the Australian far left’s evolving attitude towards Indigenous peoples, locating a tradition of working-class solidarity dating back to the 1890s. Humphreys is not blind, however, to the fact that this tradition was a minority perspective, or that solidarity was often clouded by paternalism and assimilatory thinking.

The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa opens up space for further work on Māori economies and economic resistance, on possible reparative obligations of private sector financial institutions and agents in New Zealand, and on how the New Zealand state in recent centuries has enabled a particular colonial and economic order.

If you’ve ever been called a Luddite, it was probably meant as an insult. The Luddite name has been so powerfully besmirched that it is now commonly used as a pejorative to denote technophobia or an irrational aversion to progress. At the heart of Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine is a denouncement of this mischaracterisation. And in dismantling the myth, Merchant revitalises the legend.