Reinventing Storytelling One Book at a Time

Rebecca Kuang’s 'Yellowface', 'Babel', and more

News & Reviews Magazine

This article is part of our August edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable. If you like that this type of independent media exists, please back it!

The piece you’re reading now is by Astrid Edwards. Astrid is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing and has interviewed more than 200 of Australia’s most prominent writers and publishers. She is a teacher in the Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University and sometimes judges literary prizes, including the 2023 Stella Prize. In 2023 she began a PhD at the University of Melbourne exploring potential and perceived barriers to publishing and selling climate fiction in Australia. In 2021 Astrid contributed to the anthology Growing Up Disabled in Australia and made her debut appearance on Q+A in 2021.

Astrid writes for News & Reviews every month. Her last piece for GarnerRama Part II used The Spare Room by Helen Garner to consider the depiction of care work in fiction.

Yellowface, released in May this year, deserves the hype. It is both literary and commercial fiction, making it something of a unicorn in publishing. It is a book everyone is reading, not least because it is a calculated evisceration of contemporary publishing.