In this week’s ABR podcast, listen to Ronan McDonald discuss one hundred years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, among the most famous books of the twentieth century.

Italy is used to political volatility. In today’s ABR Podcast, we learn about the new test facing Italy’s fragile political system following the cessation of the relatively stable leadership of Mario Draghi.

In our October issue ABR Editor and award-winning memoirist Peter Rose reviews Childhood, a remarkable new memoir by Adelaide critic and writer Shannon Burns in which Burns relates the story of a childhood and adolescence spent in great poverty and neglect. 

As the November election date approaches for Victoria, Daniel Andrews is currently Australia’s longest-serving incumbent state premier. Journalist and author Gideon Haigh examines a new biography of Andrews by The Age’s state political reporter Sumeyya Ilanbey, noting her astute observations of Andrews and his ‘modus oper-Andrews’.

In this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize, we received more than 1,300 entries from thirty-six different countries, a testament to ongoing international interest in the Jolley Prize and ABR. Writers explored themes and topics including the pandemic, climate change, grief, desire, parenthood, and community. In this week’s podcast, the three finalists read their shortlisted stories: ‘Dog Park’ by Nina Cullen, ‘Natural Wonder’ by Tracy Ellis, and ‘Whale Fall’ by C.J. Garrow. They are briefly introduced by Jolley Prize judge and ABR Deputy Editor, Amy Baillieu.

The runner-up in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize, Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ confronts spectres of the past in order to pose questions about how to live ethically in the present and about what responsibilities we bear towards the future. Drawing on a wide range of writers and thinkers as well as her grandfather’s experience of the Holocaust, Gory plots the process by which one generation’s traumatic suffering becomes another’s imaginative investment.

Based on Antonio Garcia Gutierrez’s El Trovador, a romantic melodrama set against the backdrop of a fifteenth-century Spanish civil war, Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore has been described as the ‘apotheosis of the bel canto opera, with its demands for vocal beauty, agility and range’. Yet in what is also his darkest and most death-haunted work, Verdi invests the brightness and vocal embellishments of bel canto with greater dramatic tension ...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February this year was met with near universal condemnation by Western nations. While aggression of this kind and on this scale has been relatively anomalous this side of the second world war, Russia’s disregard for the laws and institutions upholding global peace and security is far from unprecedented. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Ben Saul reads his commentary piece from the July issue, arguing that Western disrespect for international law is entirely consistent with Russia’s violation of ‘a stable, mutually agreed world order’ ...

A year before he ascended to the prime ministership of India in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that his nation was ‘a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads’. Yet, in the seventy-five years since India’s independence, secularist tolerance of religious and cultural difference has been eroded by a rising tide of Hindu majoritarianism. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, John Zubrzycki reads his commentary on India’s transformation under Narendra Modi’s leadership ...

Of the many pernicious legacies of colonialism, Australia’s servility in the face of Britain’s nuclear arms aspirations is one of the most under-reported and most consequential. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Elizabeth Tynan reads her essay tracing the clandestine history of, and fallout from, the agreements that allowed the British to test atomic weapons at various sites in South and Western Australia after World War II. By highlighting the Menzies government’s eager consent and the Australian media’s compliance, Tynan shows that far from being a passive victim, Australia was largely complicit in tests that wrought havoc on large tracts of land and on the Indigenous communities who lived there.