Alex Gerrans

Oct 14, 2024 | meanjin.com.au | Alex Gerrans

Reviewed: The Degenerates, Raeden Richardson, TextIs writing a messianic pursuit? In The Degenerates, yes. When the novel opens, we encounter Dalit enterprising hopeful Somnath on the streets of late-1970s Bombay as he hustles for a living. But when he’s swiftly apprehended by authorities and castrated due to his caste, he flees to Melbourne with a beggar’s baby he finds discarded on the side of the road.

Aug 27, 2024 | meanjin.com.au | Alex Gerrans

Reviewed: The Director and the Daemon, Pitaya Chin, Puncher & WattmannThe Director and the Daemon is the right book for a time when the world is both unbearably grotesque and slapstick. A TV director is offered funding for another season by a company that runs Australia’s off-shore detention centres. The director is in love with their inscrutable star who won’t stick around if there’s no new season. An activist group stalks and bashes fossil fuel associates.

Feb 22, 2024 | meanjin.com.au | Alex Gerrans |Rosie Ward |Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen |Imogen Dewey

I often read like I’m prospecting for an essential fact or figure. Novels resist this approach in a way that non-fiction doesn’t. As such, my three best Australian novels of 2023 are grounded in place and relationships. In Paradise Estate by Max Easton, Helen, in her late thirties, returns to sharehousing in Sydney after a breakup and the death of her brother. The house is a dilapidated ruin.

Nov 29, 2023 | meanjin.com.au | Alex Gerrans

Reviewed: The In-Between, Christos Tsiolkas, Allen & UnwinThe In-Between is Christos Tsiolkas consciously yoking himself to Australian literature in a historical sense. It begins with an epigraph from Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, another novel by a gay Australian writer which is about time and change more than it is about the relationship between two people, even if it is anchored by their marriage and the making of a homestead on stolen land in New South Wales.

Nov 14, 2023 | meanjin.com.au | Alex Gerrans

Reviewed: Green Dot, Madeleine Gray, Allen & UnwinSharper observers than I have written on the problems of the quid-pro-quo blurb industry, the lack of critical culture around Australian novels, and the labour conditions that are responsible for this budding dynamic. Such is the environment that produces descriptions of extremely middling work as possessing ‘sheer brilliance’.