Welcome to our much-anticipated December issue!
• Books of the Year - More than forty senior critics, writers, broadcasters, and booksellers have nominated their favourite books of the year
• Publisher’s Picks - a dozen major publishers/editors nominate 2016 books from other publishing houses
• Paul Genoni on George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s time on Hydra
• Peter Craven on Tim Winton’s ‘rich and brilliant’ essay collection The Boy Behind the Curtain
• Fiona Gruber on Scientology
• Philosopher Peter Singer is our Open Page guest
December 2016, no. 387
Books of the Year 2016
Originally published in German, Albrecht Dümling’s The Vanished Musicians: Jewish refugees in Australia (Peter Lang), a fascinating compendium of Jewish musicians who found refuge in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, is now available in Australian Diana K. Weekes’s excellent translation ...
Peter Craven reviews 'The Boy Behind the Curtain' by Tim Winton
Everybody thinks they know about Tim Winton: the working-class hero from the West; the whale of a man who’s been writing since he was a boy; the master of one of ...
James McNamara reviews 'The Sellout' by Paul Beatty
The morning after the US election, Los Angeles was still. Usually a roar of noise, my city was stunned silent. As I spoke with distraught friends and colleagues, the fact that ...
Fiona Hile reviews 'Letter to Pessoa & Other Short Fictions' by Michelle Cahill
You can tell a lot about a piece of writing from how it begins. For American poet Billy Collins, ‘the first line is the DNA of the poem’. With novels, as J.M. Coetzee writes ...
