Shakespeare is not a hoax, but he is hoaxy. The field of Shakespeare studies is brimming with fibs and fables. There are the ‘Shakespeare heretics’ who have posited, on flimsy evidence, that Henry Neville, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, or someone else was the ‘secret author’ of William Shakespeare’s works. There have been plenty of frauds and near-frauds on the ‘orthodox’ side of Shakespeare studies as well. A.L. Rowse, for example, simply made up an elaborate back story for the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Now eighty-eight years old, the famously private Thomas Pynchon has produced his first book since the publication of Bleeding Edge in 2013. Shadow Ticket – appearing sixty-two years after his first novel, V. – is immediately recognisable within Pynchon’s distinctive, postmodern oeuvre. The plot swerves between real and alternative worlds, various literary and cinematic genres are parodied, and established conventions of narrative representation are undermined.

Else is not your average climate change novel; it is too rich and strange and visionary. Civilisation is collapsing, though we see very little of that. We follow the exodus of a woman and her teenage daughter from Melbourne to a future Mornington Peninsula over several seasons, across a territory alternately submerged in floods and blasted by fire.

Troy Bramston is fast becoming the Peter FitzSimons of Australian political biography. Every few years a door-stopping volume on a prime minister appears, brandishing the same formula of ‘never before seen’ documents and ‘fresh revelations’. In the Acknowledgements to this latest biography of Gough Whitlam, Bramston virtually pleads with readers to render homage to the ‘hundreds’ of interviews he conducted, the ‘thousands’ of pages turned in archives, the miles clocked in libraries visited. There is a diligent busyness to the enterprise. But Bramston’s relentless emphasis on the quantitative smothers his underlying inability to master the material. The result, sadly, is an incomplete picture of Whitlam: a workman-like chronicle of the life, but not a deep exploration of the political and intellectual dimensions of the man.

There is change. Then there is rate of change, known as velocity. Then there is rate of rate of change, known as acceleration. In physics, the three are distinct; psychologically, however, the distinction is more difficult to conceive. Certainly, this seems the case for Richard King in his latest book, Brave New Wild: in detailing an apparently new techno-political phenomenon called ecomodernism, he seems to confuse an uptick in the rate of technological change for a distinct change in itself, arguing that we are at the start of a paradigm shift.

Aboriginal poetry has the ability to hold love and rage simultaneously. Luke Patterson’s début A Savage Turn does this masterfully, constructing pieces full of fire and defiance ‘amongst the love / poems’. In this collection, Patterson - a Gamilaroi poet, educator, and musician – unpacks colonial myth and legacy, subverts reader expectations, and teases out a tenderness that nourishes this collection.

I learnt about the Erin Patterson verdict from Allen & Unwin. They broke the news with a PR blast for Greg Haddrick’s The Mushroom Murders: ‘A family lunch. Three deaths. What really happened?’ (a tagline designed to fit any outcome). I checked the timestamps. The jury had been discharged from the Morwell courthouse at 2:28 pm; the marketing email landed in my inbox at 3:28 pm. It takes longer to wrap and roast a beef wellington.

The Greek diaspora featured strongly in Andrew Pippos’s first novel, Lucky’s (2020), which traced the life of Chicago-born Vasilis ‘Lucky’ Mallios, who develops a chain of eponymous franchise restaurants often run by Greek Australians that mimic mid-twentieth-century American diners. The fortunes, and misfortunes, of Lucky and his restaurants in turn become the subject of a planned New Yorker article by journalist Emily Main.

As a young regional reporter in Western Australia some years ago, I enthusiastically sounded the alarm about ‘wild dogs’ attacking faraway places in the desert interior. The hybrid offspring of dingoes and feral dogs had bred to ‘plague proportions’ in their remote strongholds and were now returning, nosing through gaps in fences, invading run-down and defenceless farming districts, mining camps, and rail depots. Concerned landholders, the line crackling with distance, described an elusive beast of endless hunger, cruel and cunning, haunting the margins of our world. It was beautiful, the stuff of science fiction or fantasy. The stories were picked up and reprinted by our parent newspaper in the city; an urban public apparently shared our concerns about murderous feral carnivores. All that year, while reporting on them, I never saw a wild dog.

Things can turn very quickly, my mother says. Be careful who you associate with. Με όλους και με κανέναν. With everyone and with no one. Watch what you do and what you say because they’re always watching – then, one day, they’ll write your name on ‘the list’ and we’ll never see you again.