Who’s that strutting in like a swan, a bull,
An eagle, an ant, a cuckoo, a snake,
Satyr, rain shower, a stallion, a ram,
Six bone-dry dolphins breaking through the foam,

It is in places like Alice Springs and remote towns like Yuendumu that the fleshy, malignant knot in the corpus of the settler-colonial nation state becomes utterly, obscenely visible. If you’re drawn to these places, you will find that regardless of who you are, at some point you will have to sit in your discomfort. In that profound culture shock, you have to accept that you are a foreigner in what you might regard as your own country.

Who is Kamala Harris and what does she stand for? This question animated coverage across the political spectrum during her 2024 US presidential campaign, even though she was already serving as Vice President – the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to hold the office. At crucial points, Harris herself struggled to articulate her own distinctive agenda. When asked on the television talk show The View what she would have done differently from Democrat President Joe Biden over the past four years, she replied, ‘There is not a thing that comes to mind.’

Walter Lippmann might be the defining example of a public intellectual. He profoundly influenced public and political debate in America during the twentieth century. A prolific journalist and columnist, he also published ten major books and even more edited collections and compilations. The best of these were thought-provoking disquisitions on public opinion, communications, politics, international relations, and the ways in which liberal thought has developed in the United States. His was, argues Tom Arnold-Forster, ‘a six-decade commentary on the vicissitudes of politics’.

Mariana Enríquez is deep in the catacombs beneath Montparnasse, the dead arranged in obedient rows. She has a plan. All she needs is a distraction, and one arrives in the form of a fainting tourist, a convenient wuss. The man falls hard – his skull thwacks the stone floor – and Enríquez seizes her moment. She slips into an alcove, works a slim bone loose, and slides it into her jacket sleeve ‘like a knife’. She strolls out past the exit guard and into the Paris daylight. ‘Is it a serious crime to steal a bone?’ she asks. ‘The catacombs are a museum, after all. But I feel so innocent!’

In a recent interview published in ABR (November 2025), Melissa Lucashenko was asked what qualities she looks for in critics and editors. ‘Language that I can understand without needing a thesaurus,’ she responded. ‘Some points of connection, regardless of how far apart our cultures of origin might be.’ This collection of twenty non-fiction pieces written over two decades draws together a selection of keynote addresses, feature articles, radio presentations, speeches, and reviews, many previously unpublished. These pieces reflect on her career as a writer, a public intellectual, and the author of celebrated novels; Too Much Lip won the Miles Franklin Award in 2019 and her historical novel Edenglassie has won a series of prestigious awards since its publication in 2023. The pieces in this collection are also ‘personal’. The heron that features on the hardcover design of this collection gestures to Lucashenko’s totem, and we follow its tracks across the page.

‘I think it is the art of the glimpse’, said William Trevor of the short story.

If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

Early in beautiful changelings, Maxine Beneba Clarke writes: ‘i would like a hysterectomy.’ It is a sentence with no lyrical ambition, arriving in the voice of a medical form or consent document. But in the space of a poem, it performs a different task; it returns medical language to the body that had to speak it. Clarke’s work proceeds from this logic. Her poems do not translate pain into metaphor; they record how pain enters systems: reproductive, racial, bureaucratic.

What does a biographer do when she discovers she has something wrong? I am not talking about a misinterpretation, but missing a great big whopping fact …

In this case, the new information did not concern my subject directly, but her mother. Nevertheless, it has caused me to rewrite parts of both the life and the myth of Charmian Clift.

In Carralon Ridge, a fictional, dilapidated town in New South Wales, Sam Crowley goes missing on the day of his twenty-first birthday. Every year, the community comes together for an annual vigil, but among the mourners there may be someone who knows what happened. In the background, the incessant activity of a nearby open-cut coal mine threatens the very existence of the village.