Inga Simpson’s The Thinning owes a literary debt to the American nature writer Annie Dillard’s evergreen essay ‘Total Eclipse’ (1982). An account of the solar eclipse that Dillard observed on 26 February 1979, ‘Total Eclipse’ aims not merely to narrate experience but also to impart the shock of estrangement. It is an essay in awe, shot through with verbal echoes. In the moon’s long shadow, Dillard glimpsed an otherworld in which the hillside’s ‘hues were metallic; their finish was matte’, in which the living appeared as if preserved within ‘a tinted photograph from which the tints had faded’. When perfectly aligned, the moon and sun come to resemble a ‘thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring’: a partial eclipse’s relation to a total eclipse is the relation of ‘kissing a man’ to ‘marrying him’. What Dillard knew well, and what her sentences know best of all, is that there is a patness to causal narrative that impedes the expression of a genuine revelation. No amount of careful set-up can quite account for the new.

In the cover of Little Bit, a hot-pink neon sign points the way to the dive bars and deprivation within, priming the reader for a certain type of story. Think Natassja Kinski as Jane in her pink peepshow sweater in Paris, Texas. It’s going to be a book about good women, bad men, cheap sex, crime, alcohol, and trouble.

This is a brave book, for it is the biography of a phantom. Archives hold ample evidence of the many professional achievements of the surveyor Thomas Scott Townsend, but of him personally almost nothing is known. Townsend left little trace of his passions, frustrations, or loves, the substance that animates biographies. A letter that Townsend wrote to his brother in 1839 is the only item of his private correspondence known to exist. And yet somehow the book works, and brilliantly so. Peter Crowley has written a compelling account of a remarkable figure in Australian history.

Jakob Ziguras – widely published in Australian literary magazines and the recipient of prestigious poetry prizes – was born in Poland and came to Australia as a child with his parents in 1984. He studied fine arts before completing a doctorate in philosophy, which he teaches (he is also a translator). Much of this background is in evidence in his poetry. In recent years he has lived in his birthplace, Wrocław, Poland, translating contemporary Polish poets while working on his third book of poems, Venetian Mirrors.

At the beginning of Hamlet (Act I, sc. 3, 177 ff.), Laertes warns Ophelia against becoming too attached to the young prince.

On 26 October 2002, two days before closing a deal to purchase Twitter for US$44 billion (A$61.4 billion), Elon Musk walked into its San Francisco headquarters carrying a white porcelain sink. He walked up to an unattended front desk in the lobby and said, to no one: ‘You can’t help but let that sink in.’ Of course, he didn’t really say this to no one. His triumphant entrance at Twitter HQ was staged, the video shared with his 120 million Twitter followers, with the phrase: ‘Let That Sink In!’

Criticisms first. Kim Carr’s insightful yet evasive memoir, A Long March, reads more like a short march. As a key left factional leader in the Australian Labor Party for the best part of forty years, the former Victorian senator squibs on details. He doesn’t explain the subterranean workings of the ALP; doesn’t fess up on the genesis of his feuds with the likes of Julia Gillard, Kim Beazley, Greg Combet, Anthony Albanese, and John Cain; doesn’t come clean on the part he played in the fall of the Gillard government in 2013; and doesn’t take his share of responsibility for the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments’ failure to implement his laudable industry policies. This book should be more revealing, much longer, and much more reflective.

From bountiful feasts on collective farms to choreographed parades in Red Square, Soviet Socialist Realism painted a world of triumphant spectacle. In the eyes of Western critics, however, these images were as bland as they were removed from Soviet reality. As a result, Socialist Realism hovered on the margins of art history almost until the end of the twentieth century, when a series of studies in the early 1990s moved away from the reductive assessment of the movement as vulgar propaganda, revealing a complex and intriguing aesthetic reasoning within its production. A subsequent wave of further research would foreground the influence of this artistic production outside the Soviet Union. With Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific, Alison Carroll aligns with efforts to examine the impact of the movement in a global context, placing focus on a region that certainly merits greater attention.

Every December, great white sharks leave the bountiful coasts of California to congregate at a small patch of the Pacific Ocean located approximately midway between Hawaii and Mexico. As the sharks have been diving there, they have been teaching scientists that the area now known as the White Shark Café is much livelier, and more nourishing, than previously thought. Meanwhile, a supposedly humdrum stretch of the deep North Atlantic seabed called the Porcupine Abyssal Plain has been revealed as adorned with rolling hills, some of them hundreds of metres in height, where seabed organisms thrive. Ten thousand kilometres south and east of the Plain, the Indian Ocean’s Saya de Malha Bank supports the largest seagrass meadow in the world, spectacular corals and coralline algae, and, in surrounding depths, pygmy whales, flying fish, and untold others. ‘Some of the most extraordinary, most biodiverse parts of our planet are on the high seas’, writes the science journalist Olive Heffernan. ‘Yet they are unknown to most.’

The title and cover of Great Game On tell us that a struggle is underway between Russia and China for supremacy in Central Asia. But by the time the reader has reached the book’s end, they are persuaded that China has already won and that there is more than just Central Asia at stake.