Nonfiction
Rebellious Daughters edited by Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman
I firmly believe that short story collections are not meant to be read from front cover to back cover – they’re meant to be dipped in and out of at leisure; randomly flicked through until a particular title jumps out…
Sounds and Sweet Airs by Anna Beer
Every page of Anna Beer’s Sounds and Sweet Airs – a study of forgotten female composers – contains a tempting distraction. With each reference to a composition, I reach over to my phone or computer to find the music. Knowing…
Shrill by Lindy West
You might not be familiar with Lindy West’s name, but if you have even a passing familiarity with the internet you’re probably acquainted with her writing. Her eminently shareable columns deal with topics as diverse as body image, internet trolling…
A Long Time Coming by Melanie Joosten
My father’s former partner died a few years ago at the aged care home her 90-year-old cousin, Eric, and I had been forced to place her in. Whenever we’d visit her, Eric would invariably shudder and say that all those…
Error Australis by Ben Pobjie
Ben Pobjie told me recently that he wrote Error Australis simply to make people laugh. However, don’t mistake this very funny book about our quite dismal, ludicrous history for a simple collection of  riffs and anecdotes. Like all clever…
Love Wins by Debbie Cenziper and Jim Obergefell
In June of last year, rainbow filters glittered over our Facebook profiles as a sweeping piece of federal legislation was enacted in the United States which then reverberated across that country and many other parts of the watching world: the…
The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing’s new book, The Lonely City, explores the connection between loneliness and creativity. Like her previous works, To the River and The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City eludes neat categorisation. A fusion of scholarship and…
From the Outer edited by Nicole Hayes and Alicia Sometimes
I approach writing about football with a degree of trepidation. The game is rich in vernacular and this often seems to result in an exercise in extreme verisimilitude that underwhelms in charm and overwhelms narrative. Fortunately, From the Outer presents…
The Art of Reading by Damon Young
For many, the task of reading seems simple enough - indeed you have made it this far. What perhaps you didn’t know, is that by exercising an acute way of reading well, you are initiating a delicate and sublime building…
The Media and the Massacre by Sonya Voumard
In The Media and the Massacre: Port Arthur 1996–2016 journalist Sonya Voumard examines the fallout from the 2009 publication of best-selling book Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: Making of a Mass Murderer, written by fellow journalists Robert Wainwright and…
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