Allen & Unwin

Evocations of artists, art history, and the art world have become a near staple of the literary novel, nationally and internationally. Local examples from the past decade include Emily Bitto’s The Strays (2014), Gail Jones’s The Death of Noah Glass (2018), and Katrina Kell’s Chloé (2024). Alex Miller’s novel The Deal, his fourteenth, is the latest to probe the alluring, sometimes shady art world. It is not Miller’s first such foray; Autumn Laing (2011) was based on the machinations of the Melbourne Heide set.

Whenever I spot the new flyers of our university’s student communist club, all I can do is admire the gumption. Talk about seriously swimming against the tide, the political equivalent of hawking CDs in a Spotify world. When just broaching the topic of negative gearing can torpedo a major political party in this country, what chance is there that the kids are going to abolish private property altogether? The truth is that communism’s only active role in the West today is playing the bogeyman, a danger label to be slapped on anything conservatives find insufficiently conservative. See, for example, the current US vice-president, who had only to politely request a little more corporate tax, please, sir, and voila, she’s Comrade Kamala, cackling her way to the gulag.

The story of the only female pope (to date) emerged in the thirteenth century, and for some time thereafter was widely disseminated in Europe. She was initially alleged to have lived in the twelfth century, but what would become the best-known version of the story placed her election as pope in the year 855. The pontificate of ‘John Anglicus’ was said to have lasted for approximately two and a half years, between those of Leo IV and Benedict III. The story, which may have originated as parody, flourished in credence. The head of ‘Johannes VIII, Femina de Anglia’ was included in a series of busts of the legitimate popes in the nave of the Cathedral of Siena until 1600, when Pope Clement VIII ordered its removal and formally declared that the impostor pope had never existed. With no contemporary evidence substantiating the audacious tale of ‘Pope Joan’, it appears to have been a kind of medieval urban legend. Despite this, her appeal to artists and writers persists, adaptations of the story including two film versions, novels, plays, and (premièring in 2011) a musical.

Jorge Luis Borges thought the appearance of a major new author or creative work should prompt a realignment of literature’s family tree. Fresh genealogies of influence suddenly manifested, while old antecedents could find themselves pruned to a nub. Borges knew that actions in the present can remake our sense of past and future both.

Shortly after the unexpected death of her husband in 2014, Ailsa Piper put on a grey dress which she wore each day for the next six months. Of all the recurring and often exquisite motifs in her memoir, For Life, this prosaic re-worn grey dress speaks most eloquently of the dullness, constraint, and repetition of grief. Late in the memoir, Piper mentions a photograph that her husband took of her on holiday. She is naked in a thicket of tea-trees, and although she is not, at that point, a swimmer, she is wet from the ocean and thrilled. The contrast between the solitary costume of bereavement and this bare delight could not be more marked.

Shortly after Black Saturday, David Lindenmayer was giving a seminar on post-bushfire recovery when a member of the audience yelled out, ‘If it wasn’t for you greenies, none of this would have happened.’ Lindenmayer’s response was neither defence nor attack, but rather to rephrase the man’s words. ‘Your hypothesis,’ he said, ‘is that a fire in a forest that is logged and regenerated will be less severe than a fire in an intact forest.’ Many years of research followed this heckle. The result? A counter-intuitive finding that fire severity increases in logged forests.

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’.

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).

'Arrive finally at about three.’ The opening sentence of Charlotte Wood’s seventh novel does a lot in five simple words, emblematic of her gift for compression. With the direct, truncated prose of a diary entry, we are suddenly on intimate terms with another mind, impatient to begin. The unnamed narrator is a woman alone, returning to the country town where she grew up and where her parents are buried. ‘Your bones are here, beneath my feet,’ she thinks, standing at their graves for the first time in thirty-five years. So begins her reckoning.