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September 2025, no. 479

In the September issue, Zoe Holman writes on life in Iran after the recent twelve-day war, asking whether conflict brought Iranians closer to democracy or further away from it. On its seventieth anniversary, Nathan Hollier looks at the first global conference of postcolonial Asian and African nations, held in the Indonesian city of Bandung in 1955, and Australia’s telling role in it. Kylie Moore-Gilbert finds hope for Israel in her review of The Holy and the Broken by Ittay Flescher. We publish Andra Putnis’s essay ‘The Art and Atrocity of Disaster Scenarios’, highly commended in this year’s Calibre Prize, and there are reviews by Mark McKenna on Jimmy Governor, Ramona Koval on Elizabeth Harrower, and Martin Thomas on Patrick White. Elsewhere, Victoria Grieves Williams examines the ‘trouble of colour’ in family history, Emma Dawson reviews a history of work hours, and former MP Kim Carr asks whether universities are in crisis. We review novels by Han Kang, Patricia Lockwood, Alex Cothren, Sinéad Stubbins, and Tony Tulathimutte, publish poems by Pulitzer prize-winning poet Carl Phillips, Chris Andrews, and Munira Tabassum Ahmed, and interview Brandl & Shlesinger publisher Veronica Sumegi.

September’s cover artwork is by Alice Lindstrom.

Advances – September 2025
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Now in its twenty-second year, Australia’s most alliterative poetry prize is open for entries. The Porter Prize, worth a total of $10,000, is funded by the ABR Patrons, including support in memory of Kate Boyce (1935-2020). This year’s judges are Judith Bishop, ABR Poetry Editor Felicity Plunkett, and Anders Villani – all accomplished poets and poetry critics.

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2026 Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Now in its twenty-second year, Australia’s most alliterative poetry prize is open for entries. The Porter Prize, worth a total of $10,000, is funded by the ABR Patrons, including support in memory of Kate Boyce (1935-2020). This year’s judges are Judith Bishop, ABR Poetry Editor Felicity Plunkett, and Anders Villani – all accomplished poets and poetry critics.

 The Porter Prize honours the life and work of poet Peter Porter (1929-2010). In his tribute to Porter, published in the June 2010 issue of ABR, another Australian poet in Peter Steele remarked that Porter’s writerly project could be summed up with this Porter line: ‘The model for art remains that of metamorphosis: imaginations, great events, are all transformation scenes.’

The Porter Prize has a history of recognising art as transformation scene, moving the mind. (Indeed, we like to think there are many such scenes in every issue of ABR.) Steele acknowledged the mess this sometimes produced: ‘He usually wrote poetry as, in my experience, he always spoke – rapidly, as if somehow to offer the trace of what was escaping, while the curiosity of what was emerging became apparent.’

Entries for the Porter Prize close on October 13. See our website for information and to submit your transformation scene.

Read more: Advances – September 2025

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‘Deeper into darkness: Iran after the twelve-day war’ by Zoe Holman
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In September 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a video message to the ‘noble Persian people’ of Iran. His address contained both a warning and a promise. ‘With every passing moment,’ he cautioned, the regime of the Islamic Republic was bringing them ‘closer to the abyss. The vast majority of Iranians know their regime doesn’t care a whit about them.’ When Iran was free, however, it would be different – thriving through global investment, tourism, and the innovation of its peoples. He concluded his dispatch by telling Iranians, ‘You deserve more. The people of Iran should know: Israel stands with you.’

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In September 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a video message to the ‘noble Persian people’ of Iran. His address contained both a warning and a promise. ‘With every passing moment,’ he cautioned, the regime of the Islamic Republic was bringing them ‘closer to the abyss. The vast majority of Iranians know their regime doesn’t care a whit about them.’ When Iran was free, however, it would be different – thriving through global investment, tourism, and the innovation of its peoples. He concluded his dispatch by telling Iranians, ‘You deserve more. The people of Iran should know: Israel stands with you.’

Read more: ‘Deeper into darkness: Iran after the twelve-day war’ by Zoe Holman

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‘Here in the Grass’, a new poem by Carl Phillips
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What had art – their
own, anyway – ever been
about, though, if not

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Deirdre O’Connell reviews ‘The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand’ by Ann Curthoys
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Australians and New Zealanders loved Paul Robeson. Socialists, peace activists, and trade unionists held him up as their champion, the face of defiance amid Cold War harassment. Conservative theatre critics swooned at his golden bass baritone. Māori rugby players called him ‘brother’. Eastern European migrants wept to his song about the Warsaw Ghetto. Even an FBI informant could not deny he was a ‘great and superb artist’.

Book 1 Title: The Last Tour
Book 1 Subtitle: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand
Book Author: Ann Curthoys
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah Press, $39.99 pb, 386 pp
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Australians and New Zealanders loved Paul Robeson. Socialists, peace activists, and trade unionists held him up as their champion, the face of defiance amid Cold War harassment. Conservative theatre critics swooned at his golden bass baritone. Māori rugby players called him ‘brother’. Eastern European migrants wept to his song about the Warsaw Ghetto. Even an FBI informant could not deny he was a ‘great and superb artist’.

Read more: Deirdre O’Connell reviews ‘The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New...

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Mark McKenna reviews ‘The Last Outlaws: The crimes of Jimmy and Joe Governor and the birth of modern Australia’ by Katherine Biber
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The fence post was wrapped in old newspaper and kept in the shed. It was all that Aunty Loretta Parsley, Jimmy Governor’s great-granddaughter, had left to touch of his life. ‘His hands touching that,’ she told Katherine Biber, ‘that’s why I asked you to open it. Because you need to connect with this story.’ Overwhelmed, Biber felt the ‘immense responsibility’ entrusted to her.

Book 1 Title: The Last Outlaws
Book 1 Subtitle: The crimes of Jimmy and Joe Governor and the birth of modern Australia
Book Author: Katherine Biber
Book 1 Biblio: Simon & Schuster, $36.99 pb, 336 pp
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The fence post was wrapped in old newspaper and kept in the shed. It was all that Aunty Loretta Parsley, Jimmy Governor’s great-granddaughter, had left to touch of his life. ‘His hands touching that,’ she told Katherine Biber, ‘that’s why I asked you to open it. Because you need to connect with this story.’ Overwhelmed, Biber felt the ‘immense responsibility’ entrusted to her.

Read more: Mark McKenna reviews ‘The Last Outlaws: The crimes of Jimmy and Joe Governor and the birth of...

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Emma Christopher reviews ‘The African Revolution: A history of the long nineteenth century’ by Richard Reid
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Richard Reid’s tour de force begins with the story of a single road that ‘ran from the Indian Ocean coast, ascending the lightly wooded, elevated plateau of central-east Africa, through the small but perfectly positioned chiefdom of Unyanyembe, and then onward to the west until it reached Lake Tanganyika’.

Book 1 Title: The African Revolution
Book 1 Subtitle: A history of the long nineteenth century
Book Author: Richard Reid
Book 1 Biblio: Princeton University Press, $59.99 hb, 432 pp
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Richard Reid’s tour de force begins with the story of a single road that ‘ran from the Indian Ocean coast, ascending the lightly wooded, elevated plateau of central-east Africa, through the small but perfectly positioned chiefdom of Unyanyembe, and then onward to the west until it reached Lake Tanganyika’.

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Frank Bongiorno reviews ‘Fathering: An Australian history’ by Alistair Thomson, John Murphy, Kate Murphy, and Jonny Bell, with Jill Barnard
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We have had histories of Australian motherhood for decades. Fathers feature – sometimes as villains – in some of our best loved fiction: D’Arcy Niland’s The Shiralee (1955), George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), and Don Charlwood’s All the Green Year (1965) spring to mind. Rounded portraits of fathers have figured in memoir and autobiography. Examples by Germaine Greer, Manning Clark, Raimond Gaita, and Biff Ward stand out. But not so in works of history, where there is a strange silence.

Book 1 Title: Fathering
Book 1 Subtitle: An Australian history
Book Author: Alistair Thomson, John Murphy, Kate Murphy, and Jonny Bell, with Jill Barnard
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, $39.99 pb, 432 pp
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We have had histories of Australian motherhood for decades. Fathers feature – sometimes as villains – in some of our best loved fiction: D’Arcy Niland’s The Shiralee (1955), George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), and Don Charlwood’s All the Green Year (1965) spring to mind. Rounded portraits of fathers have figured in memoir and autobiography. Examples by Germaine Greer, Manning Clark, Raimond Gaita, and Biff Ward stand out. But not so in works of history, where there is a strange silence.

Read more: Frank Bongiorno reviews ‘Fathering: An Australian history’ by Alistair Thomson, John Murphy, Kate...

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Joanna Cruickshank reviews ‘Living in Tin: The Bungalow, Alice Springs, 1914-1929’ by Linda Wells
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The ‘bungalow’ of Living in Tin’s subtitle was a rough tin shed, erected in Mpwartne (Alice Springs) in 1914 to house Aboriginal children of mixed descent. Described by one observer as ‘a place of squalid horror’, it was managed first by Arabana woman Topsy Smith, and then placed under the supervision of a white matron, Ida Standley. The two women ran the Bungalow until 1929 but the institution survived until 1942. At least one hundred children were housed in the Bungalow over its lifetime, sleeping on the dirt floor of one room with no doors or windows, provided with meagre rations and only the most basic education.

Book 1 Title: Living in Tin
Book 1 Subtitle: The Bungalow, Alice Springs, 1914-1929
Book Author: Linda Wells
Book 1 Biblio: Ginninderra Press, $40 pb, 260 pp
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The ‘bungalow’ of Living in Tin’s subtitle was a rough tin shed, erected in Mpwartne (Alice Springs) in 1914 to house Aboriginal children of mixed descent. Described by one observer as ‘a place of squalid horror’, it was managed first by Arabana woman Topsy Smith, and then placed under the supervision of a white matron, Ida Standley. The two women ran the Bungalow until 1929 but the institution survived until 1942. At least one hundred children were housed in the Bungalow over its lifetime, sleeping on the dirt floor of one room with no doors or windows, provided with meagre rations and only the most basic education.

Read more: Joanna Cruickshank reviews ‘Living in Tin: The Bungalow, Alice Springs, 1914-1929’ by Linda Wells

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Kylie Moore-Gilbert reviews ‘The Holy and the Broken’ by Ittay Flescher
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Part memoir, part manifesto, part ‘moral reckoning’, Ittay Flescher’s The Holy and the Broken opens with a tribute to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. Flescher names Cohen’s timeless ballad Jerusalem’s unofficial anthem, infused as it is with Biblical allegory and, at times, a kind of despair-filled nihilism. Whereas Cohen imagined the Hebrew liturgical expression as either holy or broken, depending on the inclinations of those who heard it, for Flescher, his own newly adopted home of Jerusalem is both holy and broken at the same time. It is Flescher’s fervent wish, and the mission of his book, that the city’s diverse inhabitants come together to ‘mend what is broken and build a future that honours the holy aspirations of all of us who call this land home’.

Book 1 Title: The Holy and the Broken
Book Author: Ittay Flescher
Book 1 Biblio: Harper Collins, $36.99 pb, 320 pp
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Part memoir, part manifesto, part ‘moral reckoning’, Ittay Flescher’s The Holy and the Broken opens with a tribute to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. Flescher names Cohen’s timeless ballad Jerusalem’s unofficial anthem, infused as it is with Biblical allegory and, at times, a kind of despair-filled nihilism. Whereas Cohen imagined the Hebrew liturgical expression as either holy or broken, depending on the inclinations of those who heard it, for Flescher, his own newly adopted home of Jerusalem is both holy and broken at the same time. It is Flescher’s fervent wish, and the mission of his book, that the city’s diverse inhabitants come together to ‘mend what is broken and build a future that honours the holy aspirations of all of us who call this land home’.

Read more: Kylie Moore-Gilbert reviews ‘The Holy and the Broken’ by Ittay Flescher

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Ramona Koval reviews ‘Looking for Elizabeth’ by Helen Trinca and ‘Elizabeth Harrower’ by Susan Wyndham
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That Elizabeth Harrower should merit not one but two biographies would have both surprised and pleased her. That the biographies would be published within months of each other, by two Sydney writers and journalists, using much the same source material, would have intrigued her, as it did me. I don’t know Helen Trinca or Susan Wyndham, or who had the idea first, or anything of the anxiety they must have felt at being pipped at the post, or of any rivalry for sources and access to people or documents, but the two books arrived on my desk together.

Book 1 Title: Looking for Elizabeth
Book 1 Subtitle: The life of Elizabeth Harrower
Book Author: Helen Trinca
Book 1 Biblio: La Trobe University Press, $36.99 pb, 320 pp
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Book 2 Subtitle: The woman in the watch tower
Book 2 Author: Susan Wyndham
Book 2 Biblio: NewSouth, $39.99 pb 336 pp
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That Elizabeth Harrower should merit not one but two biographies would have both surprised and pleased her. That the biographies would be published within months of each other, by two Sydney writers and journalists, using much the same source material, would have intrigued her, as it did me. I don’t know Helen Trinca or Susan Wyndham, or who had the idea first, or anything of the anxiety they must have felt at being pipped at the post, or of any rivalry for sources and access to people or documents, but the two books arrived on my desk together.

Read more: Ramona Koval reviews ‘Looking for Elizabeth’ by Helen Trinca and ‘Elizabeth Harrower’ by Susan...

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Caitlin Mahar reviews ‘Ferryman: The life and deathwork of Ephraim Finch’ by Katia Ariel
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On weekday mornings in the 1950s a teenager called Geoffrey William Finch would ride his Malvern Star through Sydney’s Rookwood cemetery on the way to his carpentry job. Cutting across fields of headstones, he talked incessantly. When, several decades later, Katia Ariel asks who he was speaking to, Finch pauses, closes his eyes and then, ‘with a boyish smile playing on his bearded face’, explains that he was ‘talking to God’.

Book 1 Title: Ferryman
Book 1 Subtitle: The life and deathwork of Ephraim Finch
Book Author: Katia Ariel
Book 1 Biblio: Wild Dingo Press, $34.99 pb, 252 pp
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On weekday mornings in the 1950s a teenager called Geoffrey William Finch would ride his Malvern Star through Sydney’s Rookwood cemetery on the way to his carpentry job. Cutting across fields of headstones, he talked incessantly. When, several decades later, Katia Ariel asks who he was speaking to, Finch pauses, closes his eyes and then, ‘with a boyish smile playing on his bearded face’, explains that he was ‘talking to God’.

Read more: Caitlin Mahar reviews ‘Ferryman: The life and deathwork of Ephraim Finch’ by Katia Ariel

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‘“Come nearer to Asia”: Australia’s place at Bandung, 1955’ by Nathan Hollier
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The seventieth anniversary of the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in the city of Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, passed earlier this year without evident note in Australia. In Asia and Africa, it was the subject of commemorative conferences and gatherings, impassioned speeches and articles. In Bandung itself, a ‘Global History and Politics Dialogue’ heard from Indonesia’s Deputy Foreign Minister and numerous other serving and past parliamentary leaders that the Bandung Spirit is ‘ever more relevant today’. In India, the prominent economist C.P. Chandrasekhar said that ‘seventy years after Bandung, the Global South is still waiting for independence’ and the Bandung Spirit must be revived. For the Global Times of China, what we make of the historical ‘inheritance’ of Bandung is ‘a matter of practical choices’.

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The seventieth anniversary of the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in the city of Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, passed earlier this year without evident note in Australia. In Asia and Africa, it was the subject of commemorative conferences and gatherings, impassioned speeches and articles. In Bandung itself, a ‘Global History and Politics Dialogue’ heard from Indonesia’s Deputy Foreign Minister and numerous other serving and past parliamentary leaders that the Bandung Spirit is ‘ever more relevant today’. In India, the prominent economist C.P. Chandrasekhar said that ‘seventy years after Bandung, the Global South is still waiting for independence’ and the Bandung Spirit must be revived. For the Global Times of China, what we make of the historical ‘inheritance’ of Bandung is ‘a matter of practical choices’.

Read more: ‘“Come nearer to Asia”: Australia’s place at Bandung, 1955’ by Nathan Hollier

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Kevin Foster reviews ‘The Captains’ Coup: From dictatorship to democracy in Portugal (1974-1976)’ by Wilfred Burchett and edited by Daniela F. Melo and Timothy D. Walker
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More than a decade ago, two academics browsing in an antiquarian bookshop in Lisbon stumbled across a Portuguese language account of the 1974 Captains’ Coup by Wilfred Burchett. A little digging revealed that while the volume had been translated into Italian and Spanish in the year of its publication, with a Japanese edition appearing the year afterwards, no English language edition had ever been produced. Indeed, nobody seemed to know where the original manuscript might be found. A chance encounter and a helpful librarian located the original typescript in the Burchett papers at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. While this detective story makes for an entertaining preface, it is telling that having tracked down and meticulously prepared the manuscript it then took the editors more than ten years to find a publisher for the first English language edition of The Captains’ Coup.

Book 1 Title: The Captains’ Coup
Book 1 Subtitle: From dictatorship to democracy in Portugal (1974-1976)
Book Author: Wilfred Burchett and edited by Daniela F. Melo and Timothy D. Walker
Book 1 Biblio: Verso, £25 hb, 352 pp
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More than a decade ago, two academics browsing in an antiquarian bookshop in Lisbon stumbled across a Portuguese language account of the 1974 Captains’ Coup by Wilfred Burchett. A little digging revealed that while the volume had been translated into Italian and Spanish in the year of its publication, with a Japanese edition appearing the year afterwards, no English language edition had ever been produced. Indeed, nobody seemed to know where the original manuscript might be found. A chance encounter and a helpful librarian located the original typescript in the Burchett papers at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. While this detective story makes for an entertaining preface, it is telling that having tracked down and meticulously prepared the manuscript it then took the editors more than ten years to find a publisher for the first English language edition of The Captains’ Coup.

Read more: Kevin Foster reviews ‘The Captains’ Coup: From dictatorship to democracy in Portugal (1974-1976)’...

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Daniel Pieper reviews ‘A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US occupation’ by Kornel Chang
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In the late hours of 3 December 2024 South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in response to what he claimed was a ‘legislative dictatorship’ directed by ‘anti-state forces’. In shocking scenes broadcast around the world, citizens took to the streets in protest and mobilised army units defied orders to suppress dissent. Meanwhile, 190 legislators from both parties forced their way into the National Assembly to unanimously vote down the martial law declaration. It was rescinded just hours later, and the disgraced president was subsequently impeached and unceremoniously removed from office.

Book 1 Title: A Fractured Liberation
Book 1 Subtitle: Korea under US occupation
Book Author: Kornel Chang
Book 1 Biblio: Harvard University Press, US$29.95 hb, 304 pp
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In the late hours of 3 December 2024 South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in response to what he claimed was a ‘legislative dictatorship’ directed by ‘anti-state forces’. In shocking scenes broadcast around the world, citizens took to the streets in protest and mobilised army units defied orders to suppress dissent. Meanwhile, 190 legislators from both parties forced their way into the National Assembly to unanimously vote down the martial law declaration. It was rescinded just hours later, and the disgraced president was subsequently impeached and unceremoniously removed from office.

While the bewildering flurry of events illustrated, on the one hand, the durability of democracy in the Republic of Korea (ROK), they also invoked the legacies of the ROK’s formative years and the ghosts of American occupation. Yoon’s attempted coup bears the hallmarks of an ‘imperial presidency’, a term used by Jörg Michael Dostal in 2023, complete with a heavy reliance on force and the familiar scapegoating of the ‘northern threat’ to justify such force. Kornel Chang’s monograph A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US occupation is thus a welcome addition to the growing field of research on this formative period of Korean history, when the levers of power that would define decades of politics on the Korean Peninsula were first installed under reluctant and often incompetent American tutelage.

Read more: Daniel Pieper reviews ‘A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US occupation’ by Kornel Chang

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Oleg Beyda reviews ‘The Death of Stalin’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick
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In the quick-scroll world of soundbites and ‘shorts’, academic professionals must pack their expertise into a concise form, writing ever shorter narratives. Sheila Fitzpatrick, an eminent Australian scholar of everything Soviet, delivers in shorthand. Her little book focuses on a single aspect of one person’s life with Joseph Stalin’s death.

Book 1 Title: The Death of Stalin
Book Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $27.99 pb, 128 pp
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In the quick-scroll world of soundbites and ‘shorts’, academic professionals must pack their expertise into a concise form, writing ever shorter narratives. Sheila Fitzpatrick, an eminent Australian scholar of everything Soviet, delivers in shorthand. Her little book focuses on a single aspect of one person’s life with Joseph Stalin’s death.

The book is a useful account of the dying breath of a man whose name became synonymous with ‘Russia’. Fitzpatrick capitalises on decades of expert knowledge in the field so that even a complete newcomer to Soviet history could pick up the book and learn something. In a very confident, clear-cut fashion, Fitzpatrick guides the reader through the life of a dirt-poor cobbler’s son from rural Georgia to his final bodily state as an embalmed corpse – a figure whose spirit is still with us.

The book is straightforward in its organisation. The first quarter of the text, Chapter One, sketches the life of a boy with an interest in upward mobility. With his mother’s help, Joseph enrolled in an Orthodox seminary, which held some career promise. There, Orthodox Christianity was supplanted by radical Marxism. Characteristically, while engaged in his revolutionary activities, Joseph assumed the name Stalin, ‘man of steel’.

Read more: Oleg Beyda reviews ‘The Death of Stalin’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

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Marjon Mossammaparast reviews ‘Cactus Pear for My Beloved: A family story from Gaza’ by Samah Sabawi
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Article Title: Majnoon’s shifting form
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Majnoon, Arabic for ‘madness’, looms over the life of Abdul Karim Sabawi, whose story is the central thread in Samah Sabawi’s 2025 Stella-shortlisted offering, Cactus Pear for My Beloved. The madness first takes form as the town lunatic, who terrorises the boy and his mother at the local well with concocted Quranic incantations. Thereafter, the majnoon casts fear from the sky, his ‘senseless and ruthless violence’ manifesting as Israeli aeroplanes that shadow Karim’s childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in Gaza, Palestine. Born in 1942, Karim witnesses Al Nakba:

Book 1 Title: Cactus Pear for My Beloved
Book 1 Subtitle: A family story from Gaza
Book Author: Samah Sabawi
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $36.99 pb, 336 pp
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Majnoon, Arabic for ‘madness’, looms over the life of Abdul Karim Sabawi, whose story is the central thread in Samah Sabawi’s 2025 Stella-shortlisted offering, Cactus Pear for My Beloved. The madness first takes form as the town lunatic, who terrorises the boy and his mother at the local well with concocted Quranic incantations. Thereafter, the majnoon casts fear from the sky, his ‘senseless and ruthless violence’ manifesting as Israeli aeroplanes that shadow Karim’s childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in Gaza, Palestine. Born in 1942, Karim witnesses Al Nakba:

the catastrophe that marked the establishment of an Israeli-Jewish state on the soil of his homeland. But while it was happening, there was no name for it … The images … flashed before his eyes … sad faces in ragged tents, homeless families in the fields, young mothers and children sleeping under the trees …

Read more: Marjon Mossammaparast reviews ‘Cactus Pear for My Beloved: A family story from Gaza’ by Samah Sabawi

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Victoria Grieves Williams reviews ‘The Trouble of Color: An American family memoir’ by Martha S. Jones
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Article Title: Historian in history
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We are now in a time when the race crimes of the past that shored up colonisation, chattel slavery, and segregation can be more safely unravelled. Those of us whose families have been on the ‘wrong side’ of the colour line can discover the forces shaping our families and ourselves. Only in the past two decades or so have the veils of false respectability and dubious notions of human difference based on race been lifted sufficiently to allow a focus on the history of mixed-race family formations. Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family (1998) was a joyous discovery for me, a mixed-race Aboriginal Australian who recognised the same pattern, every generation having both black and white relations in our families.

Book 1 Title: The Trouble of Color
Book 1 Subtitle: An American family memoir
Book Author: Martha S. Jones
Book 1 Biblio: Basic Books, US$30 hb, 336 pp
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Let no-one say the past is dead. The past is all about us and within.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), 1970

 We are now in a time when the race crimes of the past that shored up colonisation, chattel slavery, and segregation can be more safely unravelled. Those of us whose families have been on the ‘wrong side’ of the colour line can discover the forces shaping our families and ourselves. Only in the past two decades or so have the veils of false respectability and dubious notions of human difference based on race been lifted sufficiently to allow a focus on the history of mixed-race family formations. Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family (1998) was a joyous discovery for me, a mixed-race Aboriginal Australian who recognised the same pattern, every generation having both black and white relations in our families.1

Read more: Victoria Grieves Williams reviews ‘The Trouble of Color: An American family memoir’ by Martha S....

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‘Action’, a new poem by Chris Andrews
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Like I’m doing something a lone self
determined, I put foot to floorboard.
Into a harder and faster world
brittler and slowlier

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Like I’m doing something a lone self
determined, I put foot to floorboard.
Into a harder and faster world
brittler and slowlier

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Johanna Leggatt reviews ‘Desire Paths’ by Megan Clement
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Urban planners refer to the accidental trails created by foot traffic as ‘desire paths’. These are the unintentional routes shaped by the footprints of where humans wish to go, rather than the signposted pathway. They are the barely-there tracks, sometimes right next to the concreted or cobblestone walkway, in quiet defiance of dictated procession. It is a concept ripe for writerly annexation – author Robert Macfarlane calls them ‘free-will ways’ – which journalist Megan Clement does superbly in this memoir of her beloved father’s death told through the desire paths her own life has taken – from a childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, in England, and Zimbabwe to her teenage years growing up in a leftist, working-class enclave of Melbourne and the years she spent flying between France and her dying father in Australia, until the pandemic grounded her in Melbourne, sans fresh air, human contact, and any possibility of carving out fresh footfall.

Book 1 Title: Desire Paths
Book Author: Megan Clement
Book 1 Biblio: Ultimo, $36.99 pb, 305 pp
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Urban planners refer to the accidental trails created by foot traffic as ‘desire paths’. These are the unintentional routes shaped by the footprints of where humans wish to go, rather than the signposted pathway. They are the barely-there tracks, sometimes right next to the concreted or cobblestone walkway, in quiet defiance of dictated procession. It is a concept ripe for writerly annexation – author Robert Macfarlane calls them ‘free-will ways’ – which journalist Megan Clement does superbly in this memoir of her beloved father’s death told through the desire paths her own life has taken – from a childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, in England, and Zimbabwe to her teenage years growing up in a leftist, working-class enclave of Melbourne and the years she spent flying between France and her dying father in Australia, until the pandemic grounded her in Melbourne, sans fresh air, human contact, and any possibility of carving out fresh footfall.

Read more: Johanna Leggatt reviews ‘Desire Paths’ by Megan Clement

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Emma Dawson reviews ‘A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time’ by Sean Scalmer
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A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time is a work of history that is both reflective and urgent. It situates the long struggle of the Australian labour movement to secure reductions in the length of the standard working week – from sixty hours a week in the 1850s to thirty-eight hours a week by the early 1980s – within the contemporary fight against the resurgent power of capital, growing economic inequality, and the shrinking of the middle class. As much as it is a historical account of Australia’s leading role in reducing working hours across the world, it is also a call to action for a new generation of working people to rediscover the fight.

Book 1 Title: A Fair Day’s Work
Book 1 Subtitle: The quest to win back time
Book Author: Sean Scalmer
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 192 pp
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A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time is a work of history that is both reflective and urgent. It situates the long struggle of the Australian labour movement to secure reductions in the length of the standard working week – from sixty hours a week in the 1850s to thirty-eight hours a week by the early 1980s – within the contemporary fight against the resurgent power of capital, growing economic inequality, and the shrinking of the middle class. As much as it is a historical account of Australia’s leading role in reducing working hours across the world, it is also a call to action for a new generation of working people to rediscover the fight.

Beginning with the Melbourne stonemasons’ strike of 1856, Scalmer’s history travels a chronological course, detailing the strides forward and stumbles backward in the various campaigns for shorter working hours that emerged in state colonies and later were consolidated across a newly federated nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Read more: Emma Dawson reviews ‘A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time’ by Sean Scalmer

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Richard King reviews ‘Beyond Green’ by Lesley Head and ‘Human/Nature’ by Jane Rawson
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Contents Category: Environment
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Article Title: Wandering signifier
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The idea of ‘green politics’ is implicitly self-limiting. Unlike the blue that we associate with the right, or the red we associate with the left, green is taken to refer to the substance of a political ideology: to the natural world of plants and trees, to ‘pristine’ nature and ‘unspoiled’ wilderness. As such, it tends to reproduce a simplistic distinction between humanity and nature – a distinction that is inseparable from the very environmental crises through which green politics proposes to steer us. Consciously or otherwise, environmentalism is constructed as something to do with the world’s ‘green spaces’, as opposed to a politics of human transformation.

Book 1 Title: Beyond Green
Book Author: Lesley Head
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, $39.99 pb, 252 pp
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Book 2 Title: Human/Nature
Book 2 Author: Jane Rawson
Book 2 Biblio: NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 213 pp
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The idea of ‘green politics’ is implicitly self-limiting. Unlike the blue that we associate with the right, or the red we associate with the left, green is taken to refer to the substance of a political ideology: to the natural world of plants and trees, to ‘pristine’ nature and ‘unspoiled’ wilderness. As such, it tends to reproduce a simplistic distinction between humanity and nature – a distinction that is inseparable from the very environmental crises through which green politics proposes to steer us. Consciously or otherwise, environmentalism is constructed as something to do with the world’s ‘green spaces’, as opposed to a politics of human transformation.

Read more: Richard King reviews ‘Beyond Green’ by Lesley Head and ‘Human/Nature’ by Jane Rawson

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Kim Carr reviews ‘Broken: Universities, politics and the public good’ by Graeme Turner
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Article Title: Universities in crisis?
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Are universities hated by government? Yes, according to a member of the Morrison government, who reportedly said as much to journalist George Megalogenis in 2021. The Morrison government’s attacks on the universities and particularly the humanities were blatantly ideological. After three years in office the extent of the correction by the current Labor Government remains unclear.

Book 1 Title: Broken
Book 1 Subtitle: Universities, politics and the public good
Book Author: Graeme Turner
Book 1 Biblio: Monash University Publishing, $19.95 pb, 96 pb
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Are universities hated by government? Yes, according to a member of the Morrison government, who reportedly said as much to journalist George Megalogenis in 2021. The Morrison government’s attacks on the universities and particularly the humanities were blatantly ideological. After three years in office the extent of the correction by the current Labor Government remains unclear.

A part of Monash University Publishing’s National Interest series, Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner’s book presents a persuasive argument concerning the crisis in our higher education system. Turner highlights the parlous state of the humanities and social sciences in our universities, casting these as a window into the broader decline in higher education. He makes a strong contribution to a long conversation on the purpose of universities and the extent to which the ideal does not match the everyday experience. This is a worthy topic given the importance of universities to our national well-being.

Read more: Kim Carr reviews ‘Broken: Universities, politics and the public good’ by Graeme Turner

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‘Sestina with Silence’, a new poem by Munira Tabassum Ahmed
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[      ] commands a thunderless lightning, a noiseless rain
to spill strange – cold and dark –
over the prostrating city. [      ]
does not shout tonight, the veins
in my legs do not swell. overheard:
a child mimics a lightning strike

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[      ] commands a thunderless lightning, a noiseless rain
to spill strange – cold and dark –
over the prostrating city. [      ]
does not shout tonight, the veins
in my legs do not swell. overheard:
a child mimics a lightning strike

Read more: ‘Sestina with Silence’, a new poem by Munira Tabassum Ahmed

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‘The Art and Atrocity of Disaster Scenarios: A family tale’ by Andra Putnis
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It’s 5.30 pm on New Year’s Day. Michael and I are sitting at the picnic table under the huge rowan tree in our backyard. The air is thick with heat, citronella, and our lethargy. We had a good Christmas and New Year’s, our kids at ten and thirteen young enough to embrace the magic of it all. End-of-school parties rolling into loops of carols, carrots left for reindeers, treasure piles and tables of food. Last night marked the peak of the revelry: a crowded barbecue around our neighbour’s pool, ritual gathering of eskies, wet children and sparklers in the fading light, cockatoos luminous and screeching the last of 2024 in the bush over the back fence.

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It’s 5.30 pm on New Year’s Day. Michael and I are sitting at the picnic table under the huge rowan tree in our backyard. The air is thick with heat, citronella, and our lethargy. We had a good Christmas and New Year’s, our kids at ten and thirteen young enough to embrace the magic of it all. End-of-school parties rolling into loops of carols, carrots left for reindeers, treasure piles and tables of food. Last night marked the peak of the revelry: a crowded barbecue around our neighbour’s pool, ritual gathering of eskies, wet children and sparklers in the fading light, cockatoos luminous and screeching the last of 2024 in the bush over the back fence.

Read more: ‘The Art and Atrocity of Disaster Scenarios: A family tale’ by Andra Putnis

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Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen reviews ‘Cure’ by Katherine Brabon
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Article Title: Sixteen, a sick bed
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‘Sixteen, a sick bed.’ This lyrical refrain loops through Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel, Cure, capturing the cyclical, never-ending essence of living with chronic illness. You can be anything, anyone, anywhere, but it always comes back to these facts, this bed, this body.

Book 1 Title: Cure
Book Author: Katherine Brabon
Book 1 Biblio: Ultimo, $34.99 pb, 256 pp
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‘Sixteen, a sick bed.’ This lyrical refrain loops through Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel, Cure, capturing the cyclical, never-ending essence of living with chronic illness. You can be anything, anyone, anywhere, but it always comes back to these facts, this bed, this body.

In gentle, fragmentary prose, Cure follows a mother and daughter, Vera and Thea, who share the same unspecified illness. Both travel from Melbourne to Italy the year that they are sixteen to search for a cure, promised by way of a mysterious healer. The book moves back and forth in time, depicting Vera as a child and an adult, and Thea’s transformative year.

Read more: Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen reviews ‘Cure’ by Katherine Brabon

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Sung-Ae Lee reviews ‘We Do Not Part’ by Han Kang
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We Do Not Part, the most recent novel by Nobel laureate Han Kang, is an intriguing synthesis of topics, themes, and structures which have threaded through her writing since the publication of The Vegetarian (2007). As in her earlier work, We Do Not Part blends lyricism and violence to depict the psychological suffering of a female protagonist who strives to comprehend the trauma buried deep in the psyche of Korean society. Kyungha, the primary narrator, is the author of books with a socio-historical foundation and has been afflicted with mental distress – nightmares, migraines, and insomnia – since completing a book about a massacre of Korean civilians by the military government. Readers will identify similarities between Kyungha and Han Kang herself, and with her book Human Acts (2014), the highly acclaimed novel about the 1980 massacre in Gwangju.

Book 1 Title: We Do Not Part
Book Author: Han Kang
Book 1 Biblio: Hamish Hamilton, $39.99 hb, 384 pp
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We Do Not Part, the most recent novel by Nobel laureate Han Kang, is an intriguing synthesis of topics, themes, and structures which have threaded through her writing since the publication of The Vegetarian (2007). As in her earlier work, We Do Not Part blends lyricism and violence to depict the psychological suffering of a female protagonist who strives to comprehend the trauma buried deep in the psyche of Korean society. Kyungha, the primary narrator, is the author of books with a socio-historical foundation and has been afflicted with mental distress – nightmares, migraines, and insomnia – since completing a book about a massacre of Korean civilians by the military government. Readers will identify similarities between Kyungha and Han Kang herself, and with her book Human Acts (2014), the highly acclaimed novel about the 1980 massacre in Gwangju.

Read more: Sung-Ae Lee reviews ‘We Do Not Part’ by Han Kang

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Clare Monagle reviews ‘Will There Ever Be Another You’ by Patricia Lockwood
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Article Title: Vascular velvet
Article Subtitle: Words luminous with anxiety and heat
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Will There Ever Be Another You is a fever dream of a novel. That is, for much of the novel, the narrator is feverish with Covid-19. Our protagonist, never named, catches it in the first months of the virus’s epic global travels. It seems to have nabbed her on a family trip in early 2020, a journey undertaken after the death of her infant niece. Lockwood’s previous novel, No One Is Talking About This (2021), told the story of how the child’s life and death had propelled the protagonist out of her life in the ‘portal’ into the fleshed world of birth, illness, and love. Lockwood’s ‘portal’ is her designation for the internet, and the first half of No One Is Talking About This conveyed the rich shallowness of online life.

Book 1 Title: Will There Ever Be Another You
Book Author: Patricia Lockwood
Book 1 Biblio: Bloomsbury, $32.99 pb, 248 pp
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Will There Ever Be Another You is a fever dream of a novel. That is, for much of the novel, the narrator is feverish with Covid-19. Our protagonist, never named, catches it in the first months of the virus’s epic global travels. It seems to have nabbed her on a family trip in early 2020, a journey undertaken after the death of her infant niece. Lockwood’s previous novel, No One Is Talking About This (2021), told the story of how the child’s life and death had propelled the protagonist out of her life in the ‘portal’ into the fleshed world of birth, illness, and love. Lockwood’s ‘portal’ is her designation for the internet, and the first half of No One Is Talking About This conveyed the rich shallowness of online life.

Read more: Clare Monagle reviews ‘Will There Ever Be Another You’ by Patricia Lockwood

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Debra Adelaide reviews ‘Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere’ by Alex Cothren
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Article Title: Quick punch
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In an instance of delicious wit, a new South Australian publisher is called Pink Shorts Press. That Pink Shorts Press has chosen a satirical collection as one of its first titles represents an almost perfect alliance. The only potential fly in this unctuous ointment is the question resounding across the world at the moment: how, as an author, does one challenge reality, distort the facts, and subvert the narrative, when currently one person dominates most of the work traditionally ascribed to satirical creatives?

Book 1 Title: Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere
Book Author: Alex Cothren
Book 1 Biblio: Pink Shorts Press, $32.99 pb, 176 pp
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In an instance of delicious wit, a new South Australian publisher is called Pink Shorts Press. That Pink Shorts Press has chosen a satirical collection as one of its first titles represents an almost perfect alliance. The only potential fly in this unctuous ointment is the question resounding across the world at the moment: how, as an author, does one challenge reality, distort the facts, and subvert the narrative, when currently one person dominates most of the work traditionally ascribed to satirical creatives?

Read more: Debra Adelaide reviews ‘Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere’ by Alex Cothren

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Laura Elizabeth Woollett reviews ‘Stinkbug’ by Sinéad Stubbins
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Article Title: Cult of workplace
Article Subtitle: A novel about our broken working lives
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For earlier generations, joining a cult typically signified a rejection of mainstream values – careerism, property ownership, the nuclear family – in favour of spirituality and communal living. Ata time when a mortgage and stable employment are no longer assumed to be within reach of an average thirtysomething in Australia, the workplace arguably becomes a cult, with its own perplexing lingo, rigorous standards for membership, and redefinitions of family.

Book 1 Title: Stinkbug
Book Author: Sinéad Stubbins
Book 1 Biblio: Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 304 pp
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For earlier generations, joining a cult typically signified a rejection of mainstream values – careerism, property ownership, the nuclear family – in favour of spirituality and communal living. At a time when a mortgage and stable employment are no longer assumed to be within reach of an average thirty-something in Australia, the workplace arguably becomes a cult, with its own perplexing lingo, rigorous standards for membership, and redefinitions of family.

Read more: Laura Elizabeth Woollett reviews ‘Stinkbug’ by Sinéad Stubbins

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Michael Winkler reviews ‘Rejection’ by Tony Tulathimutte
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Article Title: Funny ha ha
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An irony of this age, when everyone is connected to everyone else, is that loneliness proliferates. Martin Luther’s claim that a lonely man ‘always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst’ is exemplified by the miserable spiralling of fervidly online isolates. This is the world of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection.

Book 1 Title: Rejection
Book Author: Tony Tulathimutte
Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $36.99 hb, 240 pp
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An irony of this age, when everyone is connected to everyone else, is that loneliness proliferates. Martin Luther’s claim that a lonely man ‘always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst’ is exemplified by the miserable spiralling of fervidly online isolates. This is the world of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection.

The US writer’s much-hyped second book (his advance was US$350,000) cements Tulathimutte’s status as a leading chronicler of a particular type of millennial malaise. He pops the zits of the Zeitgeist, probes and provokes, parading the fecklessness of his neurotic, narcissistic characters for our approbation, then turns the tables and makes us, his readers, the patsies. It is dazzling, a lot of the time. It is also profane, brutal, bewildering, depressing.

Read more: Michael Winkler reviews ‘Rejection’ by Tony Tulathimutte

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Martin Thomas reviews ‘On Patrick White’s Dilemmas: A personal essay’ by Vrasidas Karalis
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Article Title: A difficult writer
Article Subtitle: Patrick White’s address to the ineffable
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‘Lonely Country’ is the term Arnhem landers use for empty or uncared-for places. Sometimes the custodians have died. In other cases, the land is simply too difficult to get to or inhabit. Whatever the reason, Lonely Country brings sadness. There is no one to burn the bush or manage it; no one to call out to the spirits of the old people who remain on their Country, isolated from the living.

Book 1 Title: On Patrick White’s Dilemmas
Book 1 Subtitle: A personal essay
Book Author: Vrasidas Karalis
Book 1 Biblio: Brandl & Schlesinger, $26.99, 224 pp
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Book 1 Readings Link: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9780645235074/on-patrick-whites-dilemmas--vrasidas-karalis--2025--9780645235074#rac:jokjjzr6ly9m
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‘Lonely Country’ is the term Arnhem landers use for empty or uncared-for places. Sometimes the custodians have died. In other cases, the land is simply too difficult to get to or inhabit. Whatever the reason, Lonely Country brings sadness. There is no one to burn the bush or manage it; no one to call out to the spirits of the old people who remain on their Country, isolated from the living.

Read more: Martin Thomas reviews ‘On Patrick White’s Dilemmas: A personal essay’ by Vrasidas Karalis

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Patrick Flanery reviews ‘Pathemata: Or, the story of my mouth’ by Maggie Nelson
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Contents Category: Memoir
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Article Title: Freeing the tongue
Article Subtitle: Poetic prose non-fiction
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At the end of Maggie Nelson’s arresting new book, she offers a disclaimer: ‘This work conjoins dream and reality; all representations of people, places and events should be understood in that spirit.’ By the second page, though, it has already become apparent that while this work is peppered with recognisable biographical details, Pathemata: Or, the story of my mouth operates in new terrain. Here the limits of reality and dream are at times sufficiently porous that one wonders whether a particular passage belongs to the writer’s conscious or unconscious life.

Book 1 Title: Pathemata
Book 1 Subtitle: Or, the story of my mouth
Book Author: Maggie Nelson
Book 1 Biblio: Fern Press, $29.99 hb, 80 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Book 1 Readings Link: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781911717454/pathemata--maggie-nelson--2025--9781911717454#rac:jokjjzr6ly9m
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At the end of Maggie Nelson’s arresting new book, she offers a disclaimer: ‘This work conjoins dream and reality; all representations of people, places and events should be understood in that spirit.’ By the second page, though, it has already become apparent that while this work is peppered with recognisable biographical details, Pathemata: Or, the story of my mouth operates in new terrain. Here the limits of reality and dream are at times sufficiently porous that one wonders whether a particular passage belongs to the writer’s conscious or unconscious life.

Read more: Patrick Flanery reviews ‘Pathemata: Or, the story of my mouth’ by Maggie Nelson

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Publisher of the Month with Veronica Sumegi
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Custom Article Title: Publishers of the Month with Veronica Sumegi
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Veronica Sumegi and Andras Berkes-Brandl established Brandl & Schlesinger in 1994. Their initial aim was to publish books by authors of culturally diverse backgrounds and to publish translations. They also have a large poetry list and have published several literary journals. As Veronica frequently attended the Frankfurt Book Fair, many of their titles have been sold to overseas publishers. Approaching eighty years of age, Veronica believes she is now the oldest working publisher in Australia.

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cropped sumegiVeronica Sumegi and Andras Berkes-Brandl established Brandl & Schlesinger in 1994.Their initial aim was to publish books by authors of culturally diverse backgrounds and to publish translations. They also have a large poetry list and have published several literary journals. As Veronica frequently attended the Frankfurt Book Fair, many of their titles have been sold to overseas publishers. Approaching eighty years of age, Veronica believes she is now the oldest working publisher in Australia.

 

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Melissa Mantle reviews ‘Foreign Country’ by Marija Peričić
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Hard-to-see lives
Article Subtitle: Peričić’s Gothic third novel
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What does it mean to have a past you are estranged from? In Australian-Croatian author Marija Peričić’s third novel, Foreign Country, the title recalls the familiar L.P. Hartley line, ‘the past is a foreign country’, and stretches its metaphorical coverage to include the terrain of grief, childhood, the dislocation of immigrating, and even the afterlife.

Book 1 Title: Foreign Country
Book Author: Marija Peričić
Book 1 Biblio: Ultimo, $34.99 pb, 272 pp
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What does it mean to have a past you are estranged from? In Australian-Croatian author Marija Peričić’s third novel, Foreign Country, the title recalls the familiar L.P. Hartley line, ‘the past is a foreign country’, and stretches its metaphorical coverage to include the terrain of grief, childhood, the dislocation of immigrating, and even the afterlife.

Read more: Melissa Mantle reviews ‘Foreign Country’ by Marija Peričić

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