June–July 2019, issue no. 412

The $9,000 Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Entries are now open until 1 October 2019

Ferocious grace

Felicity Plunkett on Nick Cave and trauma's aftermath

Calibre Prize: 'Floundering'

Runner-up Sarah Walker's personal essay on pregnancy

#MeToo: A reckoning

Zora Simic on #MeToo, a compilations of essays on the movement

Spring is here

Jack Callil on Ali Smith's new novel

Tell us your Favourite Australian Novel (since 2000)

And be in the running to win great prizes!

Ted Chiang's Exhalation

Lisa Bennett on the author's new collection of short stories

Welcome to the June–July issue of ABR!
Highlights include:

Ferocious grace
Felicity Plunkett on Nick Cave and trauma's aftermath

Calibre Prize: 'Floundering'
Runner-up Sarah Walker's personal essay on pregnancy

Spring is here
Jack Callil on Ali Smith's new novel

Bedlam at Botany Bay
Alan Atkinson on James Dunk's history of New South Wales

#MeToo: A reckoning
Zora Simic on #MeToo, a compilation of essays on the movement

The ABR Favourite Australian Novel poll
Vote now and win one of three great prizes!

Sign up to ABR newsletters

Jacqueline Kent reviews Faber & Faber: The untold history of a great publishing house by Toby Faber

Jacqueline Kent

The ‘untold history’ of Faber & Faber should be a cause for celebration. For so many of us, possessing the unadorned, severe paperbacks with the lower-case ‘ff’ on the spine meant graduation to serious reading: coming of literary age by absorbing the words and thoughts of Beckett, Eliot, Larkin, Stoppard, Hughes, Plath ...

Epiphany: 'Braving Glyndebourne' by Robyn Archer

Robyn Archer

It was during the still relatively tentative explorations I was making into the world of international arts festival direction that I swallowed hard and made my first visit to Glyndebourne. I had lived in London throughout the 1980s, had performed there many times in various venues from the National to the Drill Hall to Wyndham’s in the West End ...

Free

Lisa Bennett reviews Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Lisa Bennett

Mainstream science fiction is a genre that thrives on quantity as much as quality. Such narratives pose the deepest questions; as Douglas Adams once famously put it, these are stories about Life, the Universe, and Everything. Why publish stand-alone space operas when storylines, character arcs, worlds, and revenues can be elaborated across trilogies?

Gabriel García Ochoa reviews Homeland by Fernando Aramburu, translated by Alfred MacAdam

Gabriel García Ochoa

ETA, a terrorist group formed in the late 1950s, was predominantly active in the Basque Country. Its name is an acronym in Basque for ‘Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’, which means ‘Basque Country and Freedom’. Fernando Aramburu’s Homeland is not the first novel to deal with the decades of ETA’s terror ...