A mid-career genre change is always cause for attention. Best known for her fearless investigations into institutional sexual abuse, it is hardly surprising that Louise Milligan should transfer her journalistic nous and commitment to social justice into the realm of crime fiction. Pheasants Nest is part of a movement in post-#MeToo crime fiction, which has flourished in Australia and abroad in the past decade. It challenges the norms of the genre to centre victims and amplify the reverberations of violence against women (recent examples include Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women and Jacqueline Bublitz’s Before You Knew My Name).

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the sailor Charles Marlow recalls captaining a river steamer in the Belgian Congo, a venture that becomes a search for the colonial agent Kurtz, said to be a brilliant if infamous ivory trader, who is ill and possibly mad. Marlow’s journey, of course, becomes a passage into psychological as well as (to the European mind) geographical darkness, and offers a damning portrait of Western imperialism.

Netflicks is the first book in UWAP’s ‘Vignettes’ series. The series’ brief is to introduce readers to contemporary scholarly thinking about pressing issues of modern life in the format of short, lucid books. Judging from the first iteration, ‘Vignettes’ promises to offer complex and coherent readings of the world we live in now, informed by deep knowledge but wearing its learning lightly. Netflicks is written in accessible prose that invites the reader into the scholarly analysis of television, should they be new to it, with clear and uncomplicated language. When technical concepts are introduced, the author makes sure to provide a definition and to justify his deployment of what might seem to be jargon.

Thirty years before the Australian career criminal Gregory David Roberts travelled to Bombay and sought to make for himself, in the words of critic Peter Pierce, ‘a good Asian life’, another socially alienated Australian pursued such a life, in Indonesia, one which in its own way was as remarkable as that novelised by Roberts in Shantaram (2003).

I'm a whitefella who has never met Bruce Pascoe, but I’ve heard a lot about him. For the past few years, I have worked across Gippsland in the field of Aboriginal cultural heritage, and many of the people I meet mention his name. Experience has led me to try and dodge most of these conversations, knowing that our discussion will probably satisfy neither party, but I’m not having much luck. People want to talk about Pascoe, and often it is unpleasant. I have heard him described as a charlatan and worse, usually by those who have not met him, spoken with him, or read his work. Most of these critics are whitefellas, preoccupied with questioning or discrediting his Aboriginal heritage.

The opening pages of Knife give an account of the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie at a speaking engagement in upstate New York on 12 August 2022. His assailant charged out of the audience and onto the stage, where he attacked the author, using one of several knives he had brought along, for exactly twenty-seven seconds. Rushdie is precise about that detail, which one imagines is rather a long time if you are being stabbed. By the time he was restrained, the would-be assassin had seriously wounded Rushdie’s left hand, punctured his torso multiple times, slashed his neck, and stabbed him in the right eye deeply enough to destroy the optic nerve.

Neil Armfield is an Australian director of theatre, film, and opera.  He has directed for all of Australia’s state theatre companies, Opera Australia, The Welsh National Opera, The Bregenz Festival in Austria, Zurich Opera, Canadian Opera, Houston Grand Opera, English National Opera, The Lyric Opera in Chicago, and the Royal Opera House, London. He was co-founder of Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre and was its Artistic Director for seventeen years. He was joint Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival with Rachel Healy from 2017 to 2023.

Autofiction differs from autobiography in that, to use Jean Genet’s formula with which Édouard Louis opens his latest novel, Change: A novel, the self is nothing but a ‘pretext’. In Louis’ case, it is a pretext for exploring the self as a sociological, rather than psychological, phenomenon; the enduring product of the social class in which it was forged. Change (first published in 2021 as Changer: méthode) opens with the narrator, Édouard (né Eddy), sitting at his desk writing what will become the novel we are now reading. His objective: ‘to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it’. This will prove easier said than done. As Édouard later discovers, the past has a way of reinstating itself, like a pendulum which is always restored to equilibrium. It is, however, less this resting place than the oscillations that Louis is interested in recording.

One of the joys of reading – and a point of difference from narratives told on the various screens we turn to for leisure – is imagining a story’s mise en scène. Our mental pictures (termed phantasia by a group of British neurologists) are a strange alchemy of images from our memories, thoughts, and dreams. Though visualisation is not a universal experience, many readers may comment that a book-to-film adaptation was ‘exactly as I pictured it’ or else ‘nothing like what I saw in my mind’s eye’.

It is only a coincidence that my book Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths, the first in a two-volume cultural biography of the Australian author, ends in 1974 – the same year that Copyright Agency was incorporated – and that it was published in time to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this incorporation. As Moorhouse himself always argued, such coincidences, chance happenings, and historical accidents are often far more important in shaping our culture than we like to concede.