‘I think it is the art of the glimpse’, said William Trevor of the short story.

If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

The Australian philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker – writing in Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading silence (1998) – argued that making sense of the exclusion of women from Western philosophy required thinking beyond a ‘spatial logic of “inside” and “outside”’; the marginalisation of women’s voices ‘needs to be understood as something more than a simple exclusion’. In the case of institutional philosophy, at least, this is because there are logics found within it that work to silence women.

Mariana Enríquez is deep in the catacombs beneath Montparnasse, the dead arranged in obedient rows. She has a plan. All she needs is a distraction, and one arrives in the form of a fainting tourist, a convenient wuss. The man falls hard – his skull thwacks the stone floor – and Enríquez seizes her moment. She slips into an alcove, works a slim bone loose, and slides it into her jacket sleeve ‘like a knife’. She strolls out past the exit guard and into the Paris daylight. ‘Is it a serious crime to steal a bone?’ she asks. ‘The catacombs are a museum, after all. But I feel so innocent!’

In a recent interview published in ABR (November 2025), Melissa Lucashenko was asked what qualities she looks for in critics and editors. ‘Language that I can understand without needing a thesaurus,’ she responded. ‘Some points of connection, regardless of how far apart our cultures of origin might be.’ This collection of twenty non-fiction pieces written over two decades draws together a selection of keynote addresses, feature articles, radio presentations, speeches, and reviews, many previously unpublished. These pieces reflect on her career as a writer, a public intellectual, and the author of celebrated novels; Too Much Lip won the Miles Franklin Award in 2019 and her historical novel Edenglassie has won a series of prestigious awards since its publication in 2023. The pieces in this collection are also ‘personal’. The heron that features on the hardcover design of this collection gestures to Lucashenko’s totem, and we follow its tracks across the page.

She brings a bag of bundled shades of wool
which overflows beside her corner table
and from it draws a choice of yarn, a range
of needles, lays them out as a surgeon might,
as a thief would, surveying a challenging vault.

This is not really a book about Australian foreign policy in the Trump era. It is, however, an attempt to chart the coordinates of President Trump’s approach to the world in his second term. It depicts Australia, not unlike most other US allies in Europe and Asia, scrambling to remain relevant to Washington as the fond and the familiar in the international system are tossed to and fro by the latest Trump hurricane. Clinton Fernandes, a former intelligence officer in the Australian army and now Professor of International and Political Studies at UNSW, is damning of the inability of successive Australian governments to explain to the Parliament or the Australian people why Australia has become, in his words, a ‘US sentinel state’, alongside the Republic of Korea and Japan. The strongest parts of the book are those which ask precisely how this state of affairs has eventuated. The questions are vital, but Fernandes knows that they are unlikely to be answered by this government.

I cannot recall an Australian history book that has received more reviews so soon after its release than Tony Abbott’s recent offering, Australia: A history. Frank Bongiorno, Michelle Arrow, Marilyn Lake, Jane Lydon, Marcia Langton, and even former Australian of the Year Grace Tame have all given their thoughts on Abbott’s tome. The reviews have ranged from mildly positive to utterly scathing. This is hardly surprising, given how polarised opinions are of the former prime minister. Mostly, however, responses from leading historians have challenged the book’s ideological framing, selective storytelling, and the marginalisation of Indigenous and feminist perspectives. This book is in every sense Tony’s Abbott’s ideologically partisan, aspirational history of Australia for Australians.

It is in places like Alice Springs and remote towns like Yuendumu that the fleshy, malignant knot in the corpus of the settler-colonial nation state becomes utterly, obscenely visible. If you’re drawn to these places, you will find that regardless of who you are, at some point you will have to sit in your discomfort. In that profound culture shock, you have to accept that you are a foreigner in what you might regard as your own country.

The sixth year in the cold hemisphere. Our friends,
on the frothy shores of home, dream we do not age,
but spin through the scrape of years
like an astronaut in her cage. Dense darkness

Who’s that strutting in like a swan, a bull,
An eagle, an ant, a cuckoo, a snake,
Satyr, rain shower, a stallion, a ram,
Six bone-dry dolphins breaking through the foam,