I wrote a book about essays, US literature, friendship, and how readers form attachments with authors. It will be published by University of Iowa Press on December 15, 2026, when you will be able to form an attachment with me: uipress.uiowa.edu/books/readin...

I reviewed an odd new collection of stories and essays by Harper Lee for ABR. Would I recommend it? Not really. Is it interesting as an attempt to capitalise on a massive literary reputation essentially dependent on a single novel? Kind of.

www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/c...

‘Someone lives in me’: how essayists enter our lives When we read, we imagine an author who wrote what we are reading and we imagine what they are like. This essay describes how authorial personae are shaped, in particular those of essayists, by cons...

My article on Montaigne, Joan Didion, Toril Moi, ordinary language philosophy, and how our vision of an essayist shapes our reading of their esssays, is in the latest issue of Textual Practice: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Why humanities students are asked to write so many essays and how rigorous essays model rigorous thought and argument

Formal Introductions: Transference and Authority in ‘Forty‐One False Starts’ Click on the article title to read more.

I have an essay about Janet Malcolm, psychoanalysis, and essay-writing in Critical Quarterly. Socrates also turns up towards the end. It’s paywalled so if you’d like to read but don’t have institutional access feel free to DM and I can send a pdf!

An attack on left-wing, literary ‘culture police’ displays the flawed thinking it aims to critique In That Book is Dangerous! author Adam Szetela argues we exist in a ‘Sensitivity Era’ and publishing is paying the price. Is he right?

For @aunz.theconversation.com, I reviewed a book that thinks it is a critique of moral panic but is in fact an example of moral panic

“Are you not entertained?”: Why some murder trials captivate our prurient interest — and others don’t - ABC Religion & Ethics A complex murder trial creates the perfect screen onto which the audience can project their fantasies: to be entertained by Erin Patterson’s trial, we must believe she is a monster, thereby erasing th...

For the ABC, I wrote about the Erin Patterson trial, the Kumanjayi Walker inquest, RecipeTin Eats, justice, and psychoanalysis

Notes to John The cover image of Notes to John, a photograph by Annie Leibovitz, captures Joan Didion seated in an office, gazing up towards the camera in a sweater that engulfs her slender frame. She appears appre...

I reviewed Notes to John by Joan Didion - a therapy journal discovered after Didion’s death - for @thesaturdaypaper.com.au and considered what it means to read a book by Didion not on Didion’s terms:

‘Morocco made us innocent’: the many selves of Robert Dessaix There is no definitive answer in Chameleon, only the conflicts and inconsistencies in which Dessaix invites us to revel.

'Rather than trying to make sense of a life as a coherent series of events, Chameleon conveys the complex formation of a human voice, a literary voice.'

I wrote about Robert Dessaix's new memoir for
@aunz.theconversation.com

As a humanities academic I aspire to the ideal state of experiencing pure understanding while remaining perfectly still, refusing to affect the world around me

Gretel and the Great War was the best new book I read this year and it’s absurd that it’s not on every year-end list.

I wrote about Alan Jones' retirement for the Canberra Times back in 2020