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This highly ambitious first novel exists within a fine web of literary influences and allusions. The publisher invites comparisons to The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s novel set in a university Classics department. The novel’s narrator, Julia, a student enthralled by the glamorous, moneyed family of a classmate, echoes that of Brideshead Revisited. Self-conscious references to detective noir and nineteenth-century romance novels abound. All of these comparisons have some merit, but another takes precedence, not only flavouring the text, but providing a skeleton for the characters and plot 

A suitable motto for any prospective compiler of a large-scale history of a national literature might be ‘No Place for a Nervous Editor’ (to adapt the title of Lucy Frost’s study of nineteenth-century women’s journals). A few of the portentous questions for this imagined figure include: how is ‘literature’ to be conceptualised at the beginning of the twenty-first century (witness the Balkan culture war that followed the publication of the estimably inclusive Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, 2009); how to balance the different needs and competencies of readers – students at tertiary and secondary level, academic specialists from various disciplines, a diverse non-Australian audience; how to choose contributors who combine scholarly authority with an ability to write jargon-free language for a diverse readership; how to construct a book that will satisfy both the searcher for information about a particular book or topic and the (probably rare) reader who wants to proceed from cover to cover? 

A purveyor of second-hand literature-cum-reluctant sleuth is an attractive proposition. We first met Jack Susko in Lenny Bartulin’s first novel, A Deadly Business (2008). Susko, a one-time employee of the notorious Ziggy Brandt, had finally established a legitimate (albeit struggling) business, Susko Books. Rarely troubled by customers, Susko was entertained by the music of Miles Davis and Muddy Waters, and alcohol. 

Don’t be put off by the subtitle. This is not a work driven by some New Age personification of Nature. If you’re looking for a gloss on the one-word title, you might focus instead on the inspired austerity of the cover photograph: Autumn Moon, the High Sierra from Glacier Point, by Ansel Adams. Then again, the book contains no mention of Ansel Adams, or of Glacier Point. During the course of the chapters, many inspiring and extraordinary places are visited, but this is not one of them.

Over the past three decades, Peter Beilharz has carved out an important space in Australian social and socialist theory. Co-founder of the journal Thesis Eleven, Beilharz’s work ranges from studies of Australian labourism and European social democracy to more general works in socialist and social democratic theory. Alongside these he has written two important works addressing the themes of culture and modernity. One of them is a study of Bernard Smith (Imagining the Antipodes, 1997) and the other is on the Polish émigré sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000). The essays collected in Beilharz’s latest volume cover much of his intellectual journey over a period of twenty-five years ‘from socialism, to modernity, via Americanism’, as he titles his introduction. Beilharz well understands that the art of the essay is conversation rather than argument, raising possibilities rather than seeking a single answer. All the essays – engaging, learned, and undogmatic – reflect the kind of pluralistic and open-ended politics that Beilharz is concerned to promote.

In 1887 Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Kidnapped (1886) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), left England for the sake of his declining health. By the end of 1889 he was living in Samoa. The British reading public adored Stevenson, and reactions in the press to his immersion in the complicated politics of his new home ranged from irritation to incomprehension. When the sequel to Kidnapped, Catriona (or David Balfour), was published in 1893, they rejoiced in the restoration of ‘their RLS’. One reviewer wrote, ‘Write as many sequels to “Kidnapped” as you wish, and we will read them with zest, but do not tell us anything more about Samoa.’

Few academics, policy analysts or politicians can see any humour in climate change. It is as if the doomsday prediction that our civilisation will one day self-destruct as a consequence of global warming has already, perversely, closed down the possibilities for lighter, more creative responses to one of the most urgent issues of our time. To acknowledge a humorous side to catastrophe is not, however, to deny the reality of global dangers. For humour, as Sigmund Freud underscored, is crafty, clever, streetwise, and implacable. How many climate change sceptics does it take to change a lightbulb? None – it’s too early to say if the light bulb needs changing.

Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora is the product of a project financed by the Australian Research Council and undertaken by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, herself a refugee. Between 2005 and 2008 she and two co-workers (Boitran Huynh-Beattie and Thao Ha) recorded confidential oral testimony from forty-two Vietnamese women living in Australia, who are referred to only by their first names. They come from a range of different backgrounds, in terms of age, class and district, but all of them fled war and political upheaval before prolonged and painful transitions to Australia. Their narratives cover generations of war and its aftermath, from the French and Japanese occupations to American intervention and the 1975 fall of Saigon, and life in re-education camps thereafter. Many of the women made multiple escape attempts before reaching Australia – fourteen, in one case.

I first came to Hobart just over three years ago, to take up a job. Unencumbered and ready for an adventure, I thought nothing of agreeing to the post without ever having visited the Tasmanian capital (or Tasmania, for that matter). The job advertisement included the promise of an ‘idyllic lifestyle’, which sounded pretty good to me.

In Ghostly Subjects, her first book-length collection, Maria Takolander brings a sharp, wide-ranging voice to various themes of haunting. What, after all, does it mean for a subject to be ghostly? Takolander reveals a fasci-nation with the ways that surfaces of many kinds might be disrupted within the poetic text – for example, the ways in which the present can be interrupted by the pressures of the past, or an external geography of landscape by the private desires of the heart, or the stage of global events by the graspable scale of the local. And as these boundaries blur and suffuse, Takolander’s poetry suggests that the subject is not only the world under the scrutiny of the poet’s eye, but also the subjectivities of poet and reader, both drawn into these shifting spheres of light, shadow, and surprise.