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There is only one verse in the Koran that deals with suicide. Its content seems pretty clear: ‘Do not kill yourselves’ (4:29). Of course, the verse has not stopped waves of Muslim suicide bombers in the past twenty-five years. Nor has it stopped a smattering of extremist Muslim clerics from using the Koran to promote or justify suicide missions. Their somewhat contorted reasoning usually goes like this: the Koran promises an afterlife to so-called martyrs who die ‘struggling in the way of God’ (2:154); therefore, those who are killed in Allah’s way are not considered dead but ‘are alive, are provided sustenance from their Lord’ (3:169). Thus, suicide bombers have not transgressed verse 4:29 but are martyrs who have died defending Islam and will live on in the afterlife.

David Malouf’s The Complete Stories brings together the three and a bit books, spanning twenty-five years, that constitute his forays into shorter fiction: Antipodes (1985), Dream Stuff (2000), and Every Move You Make (2006), along with two stories that accompanied his novella Child’s Play (1982). Given that this is a collection rather than a selection – no stories are cut from the earlier books – the quality ebbs and flows, both from story to story and from book to book. Despite its slight imperfections, The Complete Stories confirms that Malouf is, at his best, a masterful exponent of short fiction.

In his poem ‘Reunion’, Mike Ladd takes us back to his old school in Adelaide. Three stanzas recapitulate the journey before another four talk us through the fate of the poet’s former schoolmates. Some of these outcomes are predictably neat: ‘How the wild girl became a matron, / and the prim one, a single mum, at seventeen.’ The ‘cop’s son’ ‘was shot dead in Afghanistan, / a mercenary, picked off by sniper fire’, while ‘the thin and gormless one / made a fortune dealing stocks’.

From the horror of ‘traumascapes’ – the eponymous subject of Tumarkin’s first book (2005) – to the noble quality we call courage is one of those small steps that equate to giant leaps. Having spent a long time thinking and writing about the devastation caused to particular sites during the harsher episodes of recent history, Tumarkin has moved on to the human sentiments associated with those acts. Courage is not the only one, but because it appears so positive and universal it is a prime subject for interrogation, even deconstruction. (Yes, Maria, I know this is the theory-speak you disdain, but like the language of science, its vocabulary can lead to clarification as well as obfuscation.)

Are ambassadors anachronistic these days, or do top-secret cables and personal finesse still outflank headlines and blogs? In his new book, Richard Woolcott, one of Australia’s most experienced former diplomats, quotes a French colleague who believes that ‘we have become a combination of travel agent, messenger boy, and inn keeper’. Yet Woolcott’s autobiography, The Hot Seat (2003), exemplifies historian Charles Webster’s definition of diplomacy: ‘… obtaining the maximum national interest with a minimum of friction and resentment’ – a rather more significant role. Perhaps this is because Ambassador Woolcott’s career spanned most of the second half of the twentieth century (he retired in 1992), when individuals found it easier to make an impact on what he calls ‘probably the world’s second oldest profession’.

The World Of The Book is an offshoot of the State Library of Victoria’s permanent ‘Mirror of the World’ exhibition, which uses major works from the SLV’s collections to present a global history of books and ideas. The exhibition itself is a testament to the depth and diversity of the SLV’s collections, and the book is thus part exhibition catalogue, part ‘Treasures’ book.

Ten years in the making, Matthew Condon’s vibrant modern epic, The Trout Opera, has been worth the wait. It has an expansiveness and generosity of spirit that has become uncommon in Australian fiction (unless we think of an altogether different book, but on a similar scale, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, 2006). Sent in 1996 to report on the slow death of the Snowy River, Condon met the storied old-timer Ron Reid, who in his more than eighty years had rarely left the Dalgety region. From Reid’s yarns came the germ of a novel. Essentially, it is an affectionate and many-stranded variation on that old cultural chestnut in Australia: the search for the original of ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’.

The third full-length English-language study of the films of Jane Campion is a book that will probably be of more interest to the dedicated student than to the general reader. The American scholar Kathleen McHugh is a stiff though clear and conscientious writer who takes care to make her research visible and to spell out any possibly unfamiliar ideas. She has the academic knack for seizing upon parallels, oppositions and ironies, and working through their permutations. Writing, for example, of Campion’s early preoccupations with ethnography and surrealism, she notes that ‘the two form a matched set, ethnography setting out to make the strange ... familiar, surrealism endeavouring to make the familiar strange’. Having set forth a handful of ‘reversible’ concepts of this kind, McHugh goes on to apply them to each of Campion’s films in turn: the bulk of the book proceeds chronologically from the early shorts to the recent In the Cut (2003), incorporating extensive plot summary and ‘thick description’.

In one of the most famous, free-flowing and deceptively careless paragraphs in his second novel, On The Road (1957), Jack Kerouac (1922–69) writes with disarming honesty about his relationship with ‘Dean Moriarty’ (Neal Cassady) and ‘Carlo Marx’ (Allen Ginsberg), each of whom would later become, like Kerouac himself, central figures in the mythology of the ‘Beat Generation’: