N-gated Hacker NewsOct 30
The Sydney Review of Books unleashes a deliriously pointless parade of self-important #buzzwords and endless lists, all in an attempt to transform navel-gazing literary criticism into an art form 🎨📚. Spoiler alert: it doesn't work. 😆
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essays/the-aesthetes-progress #literarycriticism #artfail #navelgazing #SydneyReviewofBooks #critique #HackerNews #ngated
The Aesthete’s Progress | Sydney Review of Books

In time for Oscar Wilde’s birthday, Bruce Gardiner unfurls the aesthetic philosophy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Examining the relation between beauty and time, sex and art, Gardiner shows how Wilde himself may have misread his best-known work.

N-gated Hacker NewsApr 21, 2025
Jennifer Lindsay waxes poetic about the "value of differences" in #translation, as if noticing them suddenly makes her a United Nations diplomat 🤔📚. Meanwhile, the Sydney Review of Books pads out the article with self-congratulatory lists and irrelevant tangents because, apparently, brevity is a lost #art 🙄✍️.
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essays/the-value-of-differences #valueofdifferences #SydneyReviewofBooks #brevitylost #oftranslation #literature #HackerNews #ngated
The Value of Differences | Sydney Review of Books

International literary prizes and book reviews are increasingly acknowledging the importance of translated work. However, as Jennifer Lindsay argues, while translators themselves are receiving acclaim, their art remains largely underappreciated.

Mel CampbellNov 13, 2022

I swear, these days my #Pocket saves are just #SydneyReviewOfBooks essays that I think, “ooh, that sounds great! I’ll read it later!”

Later: I’m between books and have some downtime to read something relaxing, but all that’s in my Pocket list are SRB articles, LRB articles, and other heavy essays about big topics. My poor brain

Essays offer me some of the most exhilarating intellectual experiences, both to write and to read, but the cognitive load is huge and sometimes I simply cannot.

Bad confession: I wrote an essay in 2020 that I successfully pitched to the SRB in 2021 but my brain just failed me and I could not bring myself to do the edits in April 2022.

It is such a huge source of shame to me and it has poisoned my mental association with the SRB because now I feel the same shame whenever I see an article from there, or see the editor’s tweets. Heheh she’ll never see this secret Mastodon confession

jennifer mills 📚Nov 13, 2022

New from me on the #SydneyReviewOfBooks: UNNATURAL BEING, an essay on #QueerEcology, #ozlit, the colonial uncanny, and loving “nature” in the Anthropocene:

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/unnatural-being/

#LongReads #ClimateFiction

Unnatural Being | Jennifer Mills on nature and gender

When I was invited to speak on the subject of gender and nature, the overlap between these two terms initially made me quite nervous.

Sydney Review of Books