‘I will not be doing it again: reflections on anxiety in Generation Z’ – Griffith Review 75: Learning Curves, January 2022

Tracker – the most important Australian book of the 21st century – The Guardian, July 13 2020

Mum and the joy of reading – The Guardian, June 26 2020

Keeping Faith with words: on teaching literature in the digital age – Griffith Review, May 2019.

Ruth Park brings Sydney to life – The Guardian, March 5 2019

The difficulty is the point – an essay on teaching reading to non-readers – The Guardian, December 24 2017

Georgia Blain’s last book, The Museum of Words – Sydney Morning Herald/Age, August 11 2017

George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo – The Australian, February 4 2017

Consider This – Helen Garner’s Cosmo Cosmolino – Sydney Review of Books, 13 May 2016

Fully present, utterly connected: Joan London’s The Golden Age – Best Australian Essays 2015

Jonathan Franzen’s Purity – The Australian, 29 August 2015

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant – The Australian, 7 March 2015

Fully present, utterly connected: Joan London’s The Golden Age – Sydney Review of Books, 31 November 2014

Michael Schmidt’s biography of the novel – The Australian, 6 September 2014

Fighting words about the rise of the creative writing class – The Australian, 22 February 2014

The Worst That Could Happen: George Saunders’ Tenth of December – Sydney Review of Books, 12 November 2013

How fiction ran out for author Karl Ove Knausgaard – The Australian, 22 June 2013

On Jane Austen – The Australian, 26 January 2013

‘A phone call to Helen Garner’ – The Australian, 3 November 012

Alice Munro’s Still Life – The Australian, 8 December 2012

Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station – The Australian, 16 June 2012

A bird in the hand – Good Weekend magazine, 24 November 2012

‘Sense and Sensibility – a Conversation’, Sensibilities, vol. 43, pp. 48-58.