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Scribner

Even in his first publication, the seven short stories of the rightly celebrated The Boat (2008), Nam Le was perhaps always most interested in creating an aura of violent unpredictability. He withheld consistency, offered cruxes, hit the reader with a blizzard of bold plots in settings so varied as to be practically contradictory – Hiroshima, Medellin, New York City, a fishing town on the Queensland coast. Where, as in the title story, Nam Le appears to relent and writes about what may have been his own experience (he was ferried to Australia as an infant), the baby dies. He is like a package determined not to contain what it says on the disclosure form; a letter that won’t be delivered to the stated address.

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Ida, a secondary school teacher in Melbourne with a four-year-old daughter, Aster, in childcare, lives in a post-Covid world of masks, mindfulness apps, remote learning, and video calls. Recently relocated from New Zealand when her partner, a lecturer in Cultural Studies, is offered a more prestigious job at an Australian university, she has relinquished the possibility of continuing her own academic career. He seems unwilling to share household tasks or help to tend to their child, despite the fact that they are both working, and distances himself by immersing himself in his study and going on long runs. In the opening passage, we are presented with Ida’s childhood memory of being on a beach, where she pretends that she knows how to swim – or rather, that she has learned ‘how not to drown’ – which now seems an apt metaphor for her marriage.

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The story of the extended encounter between Eora Aboriginal man Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, first governor of the British colony at Sydney, has often been told as both emblematic and predictive of the history of British possession of Australia, and of Aboriginal dispossession. Historians such as Grace Karskens and Keith Vincent Smith have peeled back the layers of this narrative to find ways of telling more complex, contextualised, and open-ended stories. Fullagar reaches a new stage in this journey, and the journey of Australian history more generally. She offers a fresh perspective on Bennelong and Phillip, on the nature of their exchange and the broader currents in which they swam.

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When the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom premièred in Australia in 2012, Foxtel had its own onscreen news talent cut a series of promos. A bevy of ageless news anchors – all dense hairdos and blazing white teeth – talked admiringly of how the series portrayed their profession. Journalism, in their telling, was fast-paced, often self-righteous, occasionally fallible, but ultimately always a noble occupation that served the public’s interest. Leigh Sales’s new book, Storytellers, follows a similar line, with the content and even the cover art – a black and white photo of Sales at her news desk, shot from behind, à la Will McAvoy – evincing the same reverence for journalism. Implicitly, too, there is the same nostalgia for the days when everything was just a bit more straightforward.

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Spellbinding, genre-defying, and powerful in its vision of the future, Kate Mildenhall’s third novel, The Hummingbird Effect, interweaves four matrilineal narratives that span the years 1933 to 2181. Set in Footscray and its surrounds, including the Meatworks, Sanctuary Gardens Aged Care, and a futuristic Forest/Inlet/Island, the novel explores the central concern of ‘unmaking the world’ in order to ‘begin again’.

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No publisher or literary agent could have dreamt up or commissioned this remarkable book. It is wholly unexpected and original. It is about some Yolngu clans in north-east Arnhem Land, a group of Vietnam veterans, and an anthropologist named Neville White, who happens to be an old friend of one of Australia’s finest writers, Don Watson. Watson observes Neville, who systematically observes the Yolngu, who are regularly visited by the vets. It sounds like a lugubrious farce and sometimes it reads that way. But it is a deeply serious enquiry into questions at the heart of Australian history, politics, and identity.

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What is a short short story? More specifically, how short is it (or how long)? The most famous tiny example is attributed to Ernest Hemingway: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Whether he wrote this or not, it represents the gold standard in suggesting much in little. Like poetry, microstories or flash fictions allow no formal wobbling as authors tread a perilous tightrope between banality and inspired ingenuity.

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There’s a theory that short fiction is the perfect panacea for modern life. As our attention spans grow weak on  a diet of digital gruel and as our free time clogs up with late-night work emails, enter the short story as an efficient fiction-booster administered daily on the commute between suburb and CBD. I love this theory, and I will forever resent Jane Rawson for exposing its flaws in a 2018 Overland article on the subject. Rawson explains that most time-poor readers prefer to dip in and out of long novels, where they can greet familiar worlds without the awkward orientation period required by a new text. In contrast, says Rawson, collections of ‘stories plunge you back into that icy pool of not-knowing every 500, 800, 2000 or 5000 words. Who wants that? Pretty much no-one, if bestseller lists are anything to go by.’

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Reading Richard Flanagan’s searing allegory The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Delia Falconer’s new non-fiction book, Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss, in rapid succession was a surreal, slightly unmooring experience. Both authors lucidly capture the dreamlike state of disbelief and horrified fury with which we’ve watched the world slide terribly into the 2020s. Both are part of an outpouring of new language, new stories, new ways of expressing our reactions to the barely imaginable scale of realities we can no longer ignore: fire columns that remind NASA of dragons; a pandemic that conjures news scenes we had thought the province of cinema. As our poor human cognition struggles to catch up, scientists become poets, novelists become scientists.

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To write of Herbert Vere Evatt (1894–1965) is to venture into a land where opinions are rarely held tentatively. While many aspects of his career have been controversial, his actions during the famous Split of 1955 arouse the most passionate criticism. Evatt is attacked, not only on the political right but frequently from within the Labor Party itself, for his alleged role in causing the catastrophic rupture that kept Labor out of office until 1972.

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