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November 2024, no. 470

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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

How to Lose a War: The story of America’s intervention in Afghanistan
United States

How to Lose a War: The story of America’s intervention in Afghanistan by Amin Saikal

Though scarcely a teenager at the time, I remember clearly what I was doing when I heard the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. That was a seminal event for the baby-boomer generation – not only in the United States, but around a then barely globalised world. I suspect the equivalent event for young adults today is the horrifying television footage, rebroadcast countless times since, of two passenger aircraft being deliberately flown into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

Interview

Calibre Essays

From the Archive

February 2010, no. 318

Dreaming of Amelia by Jaclyn Moriarty

Welcome to Moriarty country. This is our fourth visit to Ashbury High, in New South Wales, which is peopled with smart, sassy teenagers given to commenting on their lives and those of their friends, family, and teachers in many modes and many (far too many this time) words. Moriarty has been tracking three of these private-school girls since Year Nine. Now they are tackling Year Twelve.

From the Archive

September 2003, no. 254

‘Shadows’ by Peter Steele

Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations

      jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow

my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened

     as I am not by a lost country.

From the Archive

May 2013, no. 351

Melinda Harvey reviews Alice Munro's 'Dear Life'

Philip Roth wasn’t the only writer to take the unusual step of announcing his retirement at the end of last year. Confirmation that Alice Munro was also relinquishing fiction was tucked away on the New Yorker’s blog, Page-Turner, three days after the New York Times ran an interview with Roth on its front page. While literary magazines here and overseas continue to publish tributes to Roth, the dearth of comparable pieces on Munro has been conspicuous. Surely it’s not because we don’t think she’s any good. Like rainbows, sleep, and the Beatles, her short stories are things upon which we can all agree.