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The ABR Podcast
Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Thought’s tempo
Essays that imagine otherwise
This week, on The ABR Podcast, Mindy Gill reviews Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection. For Gill, Smith’s essays ‘have an uncanny habit of arriving precisely when the culture shifts’. Dead and Alive ranges across technology and digital surveillance, authorship and literature, and the erosion of public space, among other urgent concerns. Considered together, ‘these essays reveal continuities otherwise invisible when read in isolation: a set of preoccupations that cut across ostensibly tangential subjects’.
Mindy Gill was ABR’s 2021 Rising Star. A poet, critic, and former editor-in-chief of Peril magazine, Gill is an Associate Lecturer of Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology. She has won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and the Tom Collins Poetry Prize. Her collection of poems, August Burns the Sky, was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Here is Mindy Gill with ‘Thought’s tempo: Essays that imagine otherwise’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.’
Recent episodes:
This week, on The ABR Podcast, Clare Corbould reviews The Shortest History of the United States of America by Don Watson. Corbould praises Watson’s ‘sharp observations’ and his ‘wry and knowing analysis’ but notes a ‘melancholic tone’ as he explores the United States’ slide ‘into populism and authoritarianism’
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... (read more)This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature ‘Deeper into darkness: Iran after the twelve-day war’. Australian journalist Zoe Holman writes on life in Iran after the recent twelve-day war, investigating whether conflict brought Iranians closer to democracy or further away from it.
... (read more)This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Nathan Hollier’s commentary ‘“Come nearer to Asia”: Australia’s place at Bandung, 1955.’ Seventy years after the 1955 Asian-African Conference, Hollier reflects on Australia’s official absence from this historic ‘postcolonial moment’, as well as its unofficial presence.
... (read more)This week on The ABR Podcast we feature Tara Sharman’s short story ‘Shelling’, which won the 2025 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. In ‘Shelling’, we meet a woman in flight, driving with the corpse of her dead father stowed in the boot of her car.
... (read more)This week on the ABR Podcast, Lynda Ng reviews To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen, who arrived in the United States from Vietnam as a child refugee in 1975, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer. To Save and To Destroy is a collection of pieces Nguyen delivered for the prestigious Norton Lectures.
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