This book starts with something of a bum steer. The cover declares that Survival in Singapore is about the ‘triumph and tragedy of Australia’s greatest commando operation’. It turns out that the commando operation is not its main subject at all, as Tom Trumble acknowledges in his note to readers, but the hook for a tale of sacrifice and suffering in Japanese-occupied Singapore during World War II. This faint misdirection did not trouble me – the subject of wartime Singapore interests me more than a tale of derring-do – but it did surprise. Is this part of marketing a popular war history – always go with the more dramatic angle?

A university librarian mentioned in a recent conversation how a famous writer had sold his computer hard drive to an American archive without realising this could give future researchers a record of not only his emails but all the internet sites he had ever visited. Ian McEwan was not the author in question, but it is precisely such issues that frame the narrative of his latest novel: the first part is set a hundred years from now, while the second section consists of a fictional journal set in our own recent past. As the novel’s title suggests, a key concern here is epistemology – how lived human experience differs from knowledge in forms of representation and rationalisation.

In an 1843 letter composed on a barge in Holland, a young Karl Marx wrote of a ‘national shame’ that made him want to hide his face. He anticipated his addressee, his friend Arnold Ruge, would remind him that ‘no revolution is made out of shame’. But Marx disagreed. ‘Shame’, he insisted, ‘is already a revolution of a kind’. It is from Marx that Frédéric Gros takes the subtitle of A Philosophy of Shame: A revolutionary emotion. Although we never really discover what kind of revolution Gros has in mind, the book can best be seen as an attempt to revolutionise how we think about shame itself.

Speaking in Tongues is a conversation between author J. M. Coetzee and translator Mariana Dimópulos. Structured in four themed chapters, the book is a digestible initiation into a philosophy of literary translation that doesn’t answer questions as much as asks them. Coetzee and Dimópulos note that the book ‘aspires to some general statements’, is ‘not a work written by or for specialists’, and has ‘no scientific aspirations’. This is a fair description. Speaking in Tongues only gently brushes against the big topics within its pages.

As someone whose primary literary interest is Aboriginal writing, reviewing John Kinsella’s aptly titled Ghost of Myself means approaching his poetry with a different perspective from many of his readers. The coolness of the writing, combined with the sombreness of much of his observation of the world around him, gives an end-of-days tenor to the four sections that comprise Ghost of Myself.

The growth in understanding of the tens of thousands of years of this continent’s pre-colonial and post-colonial Aboriginal history has been one of the great intellectual achievements of postwar Australia. But if these two collections of essays are any guide, there are reasons to be gravely concerned about the future of this field of knowledge.

In a dark age on a burning planet, radical hope is not an easy assignment, but every decade or thereabouts, Bob Brown invites Australians to give it a crack. His Memo for a Saner World (2004) was followed by Optimism (2014), and his new release, Defiance, opens as a redux of both, with the cinematic story of the environmental campaign that changed Australia’s political contours.

Amazon is a company that seeks to carefully control its messaging. This is not surprising, since careful messaging is exactly what its ethical record suggests the company needs. Amazon has also, since its inception thirty years ago, embraced automation as a central component of its business model and workflow and sought to avoid any possibly unnecessary, which is to say open-ended or human, correspondence with business partners or customers. Thus, when a representative of Amazon declaims publicly, one can be assured that what is said has been considered.

Elizabeth Weiss is Non-fiction Publisher and Digital Publishing Director at Allen & Unwin in Sydney. Her first publishing experience was of a bilingual collection edited and laid out on the tiny screen of a Macintosh SE, using PageMaker 1.0 pirated from the ABC on a floppy disk. The tech seemed amazing at the time. She published academic books for many years and now works in trade non-fiction. She also oversees Allen & Unwin’s e-book program and AI strategy.

When, in a presidential debate in 2024, Donald Trump repeated the absurd lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating pets, he was drawing on a myth that has long been used to denigrate people who are racially or culturally different. Underpinning this myth is a common script – that is, a small narrative sequence: foreign people enter a community, beloved animal companions begin to disappear, and these pets are found to have been cooked and eaten in a restaurant serving foreign food.