Australian author Sofie Laguna has a gift for capturing the unique voices of the children and adolescents who inhabit her novels. It is a gift she attributes to her early career as an actor, when she enjoyed portraying children as much as she enjoys writing about them now. The common thread through each of her five adult novels, which have won and been shortlisted for multiple awards, is that they feature unusual, often troubled children or young adults whose lives are difficult because they have been let down or abused by the adults who care for them.

There is no still life except in death.
Everything is quick till dead: fish,

In a recent university seminar, I wanted to give my students a sense of how capitalism is a way of being, rather than being the way of being. Hoping to paint an affective picture, I turned to personal anecdote.

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.

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.

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.

Two months from twenty-nine
as rain slashed into Manning Street. My life,

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.

The latest in Don Watson’s intermittent series of books and essays about the United States – which now spans twenty-five years – finds him in a melancholy mood, though not quite ready to write off America.

Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie (Aboriginal) author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel was published in 1997, and since then her work has received many literary awards. Her sixth novel, Too Much Lip (2018), won the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Edenglassie (2023) won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Indie Book Award for Fiction, the BookPeople Adult Fiction Book of the Year, and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance. Lucashenko’s first essay collection, Not Quite White in the Head, is published this month.