Novels aren’t responsible for the climate crisis and probably won’t solve it, but there is plenty they can do. They can make us feel for lives unlike our own; modelling careful thinking and analysis.
Journalist Shannon Molloy was sexually abused as a child, by another young person. He talks to experts, and to other men who’ve experienced sexual abuse, to make sense of his experience.
Across her long political career, Tanya Plibersek has learnt to fight for visionary policies, not merely espouse them.
Privately commissioned histories are a strange literary beast. In MUP: A Centenary History, Stuart Kells does a fine job, but doesn’t quite resolve the matter of maintaining authorial independence.
A fascinating new collection of essays explores Indigenous deep histories and conceptions of time, showing pre-colonial Australia’s rich human past.
Birnam Wood is a novel of depth and complexity, but its depiction of an unscrupulous billionaire is also refreshingly unsubtle.
Jean Toomer’s novel is a visionary masterpiece and one of the most influential works of African American modernism.
A new book illuminates the bold lives of Australian women journalists between 1860 and the end of Word War II – a time when female reporters were ‘almost unheard of’.
Marina Benjamin’s essays investigate the social and philosophical dimensions of housework and ‘femininity’. Maxine Fei-Chung’s book gives an often-harrowing account of eight women who struggle.
Plagiarism can feel like a personal deception, but there is something tragic about it too.
In this extract from the new book Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand, the authors examine the ideological origins of the Christchurch massacres nearly four years ago.
After an outcry on social media over its requirement that writers provide a medical diagnosis, Black Inc. has put on hold a planned anthology: Growing up Neurodivergent in Australia.
Michael Meehan’s An Ungrateful Instrument is a vivid, lively novel drawing on the history of French music.
The rise of AI raises the complicated question of how we might guide it towards ethical and political ends.
A new book argues that sanctions are a bad idea in principle, not very effective in practice, and often have unintended consequences.
Judy Ryan’s book describes, in meticulous detail, what it took for the Victorian government to trial the state’s first safe injecting facility, through the lens of a local Richmond resident.
The stereotype of the old woman is anxious, dependent, useless, and a burden. But my interviews with older women found them contributing to society in myriad ways.
Short-circuiting the language of literary value, permanently wrongfooting the custodians of taste, Gravity’s Rainbow proposes a new way of thinking about what we treasure most.
The latest Australian census shows a decrease in affiliation with Pentecostal churches, despite the ‘boom’ narrative. Women seem to be leaving: gender inequality and abuses of power are having an impact.
Three Ukranian authors, including Maria Tumarkin – who’s made a powerful statement – have withdrawn from Adelaide Writers Week after harsh criticism of the Ukranian president by a participating author.
