Heat 2, the literary sequel to Michael Mann’s classic cops-and-robbers film, is weird. Would it stand alone as a novel? Possibly not. But reading it is an incredibly pleasurable experience.
What happens when a promising young writer comes under attack from the written word?
ANC supporters show support for corruption accused and suspended party secretary general Ace Magashule outside court in Bleomfontein.
EFE-EPA/Conrad Bornman
Sam Vincent’s new book is a comic portrait of a farming apprenticeship, an interrogation of industrial agriculture and an example of how farmers are connecting with the land’s traditional owners.
Jay Carmichael’s novel explores how Australian same-sex attracted men lived during the repressive period after the end of the second world war. But does it impose present concerns on the past?
Taliban fighters ride through the streets of Kabul on a captured police humvee hours after president Ashraf Ghani fled the Afhgan capital on 15 August 2021.
Andrew Quilty
A lucid, demanding book on the psychology and neurobiology of trauma has become a publishing phenomenon. It resonates, writes Nick Haslam, with an age in which people are seeing trauma everywhere.
Nimblefoot, winner of the 1870 Melbourne Cup.
State Library of Victoria
These two new romances starring bold, culturally connected heroines from Redfern and Western Sydney break the genre mould – but remain faithful to what readers love about romance.
Pictured, clockwise from left: Gertrude Stein, Lina Poletti, Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf, Sappho.
Selby Wynn Schwartz’s inventive, poetic reimagining of lives like those of Virginia Woolf and Sarah Bernhardt – against a backdrop of Sappho – has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Simulation of lead ion collisions within the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider – one of eight detector experiments.
CERN
In his 1972 novel The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin powerfully dramatised women’s suburban alienation and men’s resistance to feminist change. Michelle Arrow traces its enduring influence.
Tariq Ali’s scathing new book assessing Winston Churchill’s life and legacy paints him as a racist opportunist but overstates Churchill’s enduring influence on politics today.
The five shortlisted novels share various threads concern – childhood stories, themes of migration and male violence – but are infused with a sense of play and measured optimism.
Can you be a woman with agency, be a feminist and have faith? After her marriage breaks down, former Pentecostal preacher Louise Omer travels the world in search of answers.
Yassmin Abdel-Magied left Australia in 2017 after being hounded by right wing media and politicians. Has Australia changed since? In her new book of essays she believes a better way is possible.