Kevin Hart was born in London in 1954, grew up in Brisbane, and worked in Melbourne before moving to the United States, where he still teaches (currently at the University of Virginia). Although he has won extravagant praise from Americans such as Charles Simić and Harold Bloom, he remains, to Australian readers, an Australian poet. This ‘new and selected’ from a university where he once taught is a convenient way to familiarise, or re-familarise, oneself with the nature and range of his achievement so far.

At an average of twenty-five pages from each of eight books, Wild Track, is a somewhat brutal summary. Many highly memorable poems (for example‘The Old’ and ‘Flemington Racecourse’) have been omitted, and a few more forgettable ones (such as ‘Fall’) included. ‘Selecteds’, in late or mid-career, always have the added charm of seeing how poets wish themselves to be remembered. What may be seen as aesthetic culs-de-sac are pruned away and the focus put firmly on the poet’s ‘essence’, problematic as that may sometimes be.

The twin ‘essences’ or poles of Hart’s work, as revealed here, are the religious and the erotic – which is not necessarily a contradiction. One need only think of John Donne. Hart is a convert to Roman Catholicism, but it is unlikely that his poems have earned him the approval of the Vatican – though the present pope may be better disposed than some earlier ones. Some of Hart’s more explicitly Catholic poems, such as ‘The Silver Crucifix upon My Desk’ and ‘To Our Lady’, have been quietly left out, as if to concentrate on those where his spiritual insights are at their most personal and (to agnostics and atheists) most persuasive.

Visitors to Siena are told about two major historical catastrophes that determined the future of the city: the Black Death in 1348 and the final capitulation to Florence in 1555. Such events manifest themselves respectively in the spectacularly incomplete Duomo and in the marked reduction of buildings and art created after the sixteenth century, when the city’s fortunes declined under submission to its northern neighbour. The city’s population, estimated at fifty thousand in the early fourteenth century, is not much more than that now. It remains to be seen if the crisis faced by the proud, ancient, and reckless Sienese Monte dei Paschi bank (established in 1472) in the wake of the GFC will have a similarly long-term impact. Apart from its fiscal activities, the bank’s foundation has underwritten the city’s cultural activities, the museums, the university, sports teams, the Palio. If the two historical disasters are anything to go by, it is the lack of progress following them that has ensured the survival of this most beautiful of Tuscan hill towns and its treasury of art and architecture.

Jane Tylus has not produced a history or travel guide to Siena – there are plenty of those – but, as her subtitle indicates, something more intimate and personal. Her narrative mentions all the main architectural sights, works of art and cultural activities, but interweaves these with digressions that jump back and forth from the past to the present, from the core of the city to its surroundings, from its very foundations to the pinnacles of its towers. In this she mirrors in her text the rich, complex, undulating, and labyrinthine city to which she keeps returning. She shares her experiences and discoveries, taking the reader on her journey. The narrative is wound around five themes, each of which is most appropriate to Siena and each of which could warrant a book: ‘Terra and Acqua’, ‘Pilgrims’, ‘Money’, ‘Neighbourhoods’, and ‘Saints’.

By some accounts, it was love at first sight. When Kenneth Clark, recently graduated with a 2A from Oxford, lunched with Bernard Berenson at I Tatti in September 1925, BB impulsively invited him to collaborate on the revised edition of his chef d’oeuvre: The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Classified, Criticized and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art with a Copious Catalogue Raisonné.

Forty years on, in the first volume of his autobiography, Another Part of the Wood, Clark remembered that first meeting rather differently. An awkward circle of guests stood around awaiting the entrance of the Great Man. Conversation over lunch was mainly in Italian, which Clark didn’t speak. After lunch in the fragrance of the limonaia, Berenson continued to talk for a further forty minutes. ‘By this time I had taken the strongest possible dislike to him. His appearance, and what little I had understood of his conversation, exuded arrogance of a kind most Anglo-Saxons try to conceal.’

The opportunity, however, was too good to be missed and Clark joined the I Tatti circle. The engagement proved to be short-lived. In 1927 Clark married Jane Martin, a stylish Oxford beauty, and the court of Settignano felt ‘betrayed’. Berenson behaved badly to Jane when she came to I Tatti, talking across her at lunch in Italian and German, neither of which she understood. Jane ‘formed a dislike of Mr Berenson she never entirely lost’, as her husband dispassionately noted in his autobiography. You would never know it from her gushing letters included in this volume. She loved dropping names to entertain the old boy’s social vanity:

Thursday last week was a beano for the Clark family as the King and Queen came to lunch. He is very hard to rouse but she is charming. They came informally, no people in waiting or even morning coats for the men … the Queen enjoyed the pictures especially oddly enough the late blue Cezanne’s in my room. She had never seen a Cezanne before and thought them v.g. … The King gazed at the large early Matisse but was too polite to say anything. He would not be interesting unless he were king. The following day lunch at No. 10 seemed a great comedown!

In 1977, before personal computers and the Internet, Umberto Eco published How to Write a Thesis. It has remained in print ever since, but only now is it available in English. The book hasn’t been updated and makes no concessions to technological change. Space is devoted to card indexes and manual typewriters, offering alternatives if the student owns an IBM Selectric. Eco advises choosing a thesis topic for which ‘sources [are] locally available and easily accessible’.

Much of this has limited value for the twenty-first-century student. Also, Eco is giving advice for the Italian laurea thesis, which in scope is quite unlike the American or Australian PhD. Nevertheless, it is still true that primary and secondary sources must be accessible, even if they are not held locally, and Eco’s guidelines for manageable thesis topics remain sensible, if sometimes rather comical. He even explains to the time-poor student how to plagiarise a thesis from a sufficiently distant university to avoid detection, while carefully pointing out that the ‘advice we have just offered [is] illegal’.

The age of apex narcissism has opened the publishing floodgates to myopic and often unnecessary confessionals, personal tales of shame and struggle that, in the past, would more likely have been recounted to a priest or therapist. The memoir genre is at its peak, and the descent may be swift and brutal.

Miles Franklin-winning author Evie Wyld cleverly subverts the genre with her graphic memoir, Everything Is Teeth, in collaboration with illustrator Joe Sumner, a London-based model maker, who enters the publishing fray for the first time here. More akin to a visual short story, this oversized hardback is a delight both to hold and read.

What was it like for Wyld growing up in coastal New South Wales? The answer is simple, funny, and panders deliciously to how the British perceive Australia as being infested with sharks. As a child, Wyld was obsessed with them. She glimpsed fins where there were none, revelled in survivor stories, and fished for the beasts with her family.

The questions Simon Tormey poses in The End of Representative Politics are crucial, and we need more political scientists willing to grapple with them. His is a well-informed, well written discussion of the apparent crisis of ‘traditional’ politics, and it deserves readers beyond the academy.

Tormey’s basic argument is that the forms of representative electoral politics which were dominant in Western polities for the past century are now giving way to new forms of political activity. ‘Politics,’ he writes ‘is alive and well; it’s just changing in character and in particular becoming individualised.’ Thus the assumption that we could determine how we are governed through the structures of mass parties and infrequent elections to choose representatives, no longer holds the same sway over our imagination.

Tormey disagrees with the lamentations about growing apathy and disinterest in politics; instead he argues that the decline of party membership and turnout at elections (disguised in Australia by compulsory voting) is matched by new forms of political activism made possible by changes in communications and new forms of political mobilisation. As mainstream parties seem to resemble each other more and more, offering nothing but variants of the same basic neo-liberal agenda, increasingly we look elsewhere to express ourselves politically.

In Blockbuster! Lucy Sussex deftly relates the story of Fergus Hume and his great Melbourne detective novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. First published in 1886, it has never been out of print and has been translated into many languages and adapted for the theatre. There have been three silent film treatments (all sadly lost), and also an ABC telemovie. Yet despite its fame and longevity, the story of its writing, publication, and the life of the author have all been something of a mystery. Sussex’s background makes her an ideal candidate to try and solve these puzzles. Like Hume, she was raised in New Zealand before moving to Melbourne, is the discoverer of the first Australian detective writer, Mary Fortune, has edited anthologies of crime writing, and is a published novelist and short story writer.

Fergus William Hume was born in England in 1859, the son of a manager of a lunatic asylum who moved his family to Dunedin in New Zealand in 1862 to take up a similar position. Hume studied law at the University of Otago, worked as a law clerk, and qualified as a solicitor. He had a strong ambition to be a dramatist and cultivated the image of a dandy and a flâneur: the picture of him on the back cover of Blockbuster! shows him with a bow tie, a flower in his lapel, pocket handkerchief, and sporting a waxed handlebar moustache.

In 1885 Hume crossed the Tasman to Marvellous Melbourne with the aim of furthering his theatrical career. Despite his best efforts, he could not get beyond the fringes of the competitive Melbourne theatrical world. Although he mixed with the right people and wrote for the weekly Table Talk, no one showed any real interest in his plays. But he did have success with his novel about a night-time murder in a hansom cab travelling down St Kilda Road.

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) is the most widely celebrated proponent of a post-boom form of literature from the Southern Cone region of Latin America (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), which is characterised by cohesive yet complex narrative worlds. Hailing from a country that endured repressive and violent dictatorial rule for seventeen years, Bolaño’s narrative world is frequently concerned with evil and the agents involved in its unfathomable perpetration.

Since his death in 2003, Bolaño’s reputation as one of Latin America’s literary greats has only grown; many scholars have turned their attention to various aspects of his fictional worlds. Chris Andrews’s book Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe represents the most important contribution to this field of scholarship. The singularity of Andrews’s book lies in its sophisticated and subtle reading of Bolaño’s opus as a whole. Andrews is a prolific Australian translator of Bolaño. Not a translation, An Expanding Universe nevertheless benefits enormously from the in-depth understanding and unique perspective that translators have of their texts. Modest as always, Andrews never makes such claims for himself, but describes translators as ‘slow readers’ who ‘are sometimes haunted by quiet places in a narrative that may seem unremarkable’.

British novelist, translator, and critic, Tim Parks, based in Italy since 1981, is well credentialled to examine the changing world of books. Parks says, however, that while he wanted to comment on ‘writing itself, and reading, and books’, he didn’t want to do it ‘in a precious way’.

In Where I’m Reading From, Parks is certainly far from precious as he tilts against many literary windmills, including the global marketing of fiction, literary prizes, how we read, the state of translation, literary festivals, academic criticism, and the publishing industry.

The thirty-seven essays, in four sections, ‘The World Around the Book’, ‘The Book in the World’, ‘The Writer’s World’, and ‘Writing Across Worlds’, were originally published as columns in the New York Review of Books. The length of the essays, between one and two thousand words, ensures succinct erudition and a provocative readability, but means that Parks often lacks the space to follow through on his sweeping generalisations.

Few, if any, contemporary authors have attracted the level of critical attention that is lavished upon J.M. Coetzee. No doubt there are many reasons for this, but a good part of the fascination with his fiction is a result of the evident rigour with which it is conceived. To read a Coetzee novel is to encounter a work that seems to have been thought through on every possible level. His writing not only foregrounds its thematic concerns in multifaceted and evocative ways; it also displays an often quite overt sense of formal self-awareness, one consequence of which is that even an apparently ad hoc work such as Elizabeth Costello (2003), which appears to be (and in fact is) a cobbled together collection of lightly fictionalised lectures, somehow manages to stay a step ahead of its readers. Coetzee’s fictions are not merely well crafted; they seem to have a remarkable ability to scrutinise their own premises.

For much of his career, Coetzee has also benefited from a certain mystique, an air of unknowability, which followed from his disinclination to speak publicly about his personal life and his creative processes. His reputation for reticence (which was perhaps always a little overstated) has, however, begun to soften in recent years. J.C. Kannemeyer’s substantial biography J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing (2012), written with its subject’s co-operation, has fleshed out many of the previously sketchy details of Coetzee’s life. The book has significant flaws, some of which are attributable to the fact that Kannemeyer died suddenly before he was able to shepherd it into print, but it contains a large amount of valuable background material that places the fiction – the South African novels, in particular – in an appropriate historical context, and provides important information about the development of Coetzee’s thinking and the evolution of his art.

Jolley Prize

Welcome to our annual Fiction issue. Among the highlights are the three 2015 Jolley Prize shortlisted stories. This is the sixth time that we have presented the Jolley Prize, which is worth a total of $8,000. After reading more than 1,200 entries submitted by writers around the world, the judges – ABR Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu, poet–academic Sarah Holland-Batt, and author Paddy O’Reilly – chose a longlist of thirty-two stories before ultimately deciding on the shortlist.

In ‘Borges and I’, Sydney writer Michelle Cahill’s narrator is engaged to probe a wormhole in New Mexico when he receives an unexpected parcel in the mail. In ‘Crest’, by Melburnian Harriet McKnight, the grieving narrator finds solace, of a kind, under the Antarctic ice; while in British-American author Rob Magnuson Smith’s story, ‘The Elector of Nossnearly’, a girl seeks freedom for herself and her pony on a small Scottish island.

The judges also commended three stories: ‘Forever Re-Starting’ by Catherine Cole (Australia), ‘Butterfly as Metaphor’ by Heather Tucker (Canada), and ‘Year of the Panda’ by Jonathon Tel (United Kingdom). Advances is delighted to see that the Jolley Prize’s international reach continues to expand. We look forward to reading many more brilliant stories in years to come. ABR thanks Mr Ian Dickson for his splendid support of the Jolley Prize.

The 2015 Jolley Prize winner will be announced at a special event at the Brisbane Writers Festival on September 4 at The Edge, SLQ (5–6pm). This is a free event but bookings should be made via the BWF website. ABR will also be taking part in a number of other events at the BWF; you can find out more information about these on our Events page or by visiting the BWF website.

Over and knout

‘Rising dead English menagerie exuded moisture’; ‘New queen holds back iron – has it both ways for another queen!’; ‘Precious stone is dead, worn out’. No, these are not fresh anti-royalist taunts coined by author Peter FitzSimons in his new capacity as Chair of the Australian Republican Movement. Rather, they are clues drawn from what Black Inc. trumpets as ‘the ultimate puzzle book’: Mungo’s Cryptic Crosswords ($9.95 pb, 115 pb). Mungo MacCallum – legendary gadfly, journalist, and death-defying luncher – has been devising cryptic crosswords, first at the Bulletin magazine, now for The Saturday Paper. He admits to ‘break[ing] some of the old rules and shibboleths’. His clue for ‘Yugoslav’ – ‘Serb tells fellow-ethnic to piss off’ – generated ‘widespread applause’, he writes in the introduction.

The answers to the above teasers, by the way – as if ABR readers won’t have promptly guessed – are ‘Oozed’, ‘Nerfertiti’, and ‘Knout’.

Ten years of Calibre

For the tenth year in a row we invite entries in the Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay – the country’s premier prize for an unpublished non-fiction essay. The winner will receive $5,000 and publication in ABR. Once again, Calibre is open to anyone writing in English around the world. We recommend the quick, inexpensive online entry system. Guidelines and the entry form are available on our website. Entries will close on 18 January 2016. The judges are 2015 Calibre Prize winner Sophie Cunningham and Peter Rose, Editor of ABR.

All our previous Calibre-winning essays are available online. Together they have contributed to a major rejuvenation of the essay form. As always, we thank Mr Colin Golvan QC (Chair of ABR) for his generous support for Calibre.

Cryptic climate

Debates about climate change have never been more urgent, or vexed. In the lead-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris two months hence, we will publish our annual Environment issue in October. There are many highlights, including Ashley Hay’s ABR Dahl Trust Fellowship article and Jo Daniell’s photo essay. We will also publish a survey of leading environmentalists, scientists, commentators, and writers as to what they consider the most urgent action needed for environmental reform.

We look forward to launching the Environment issue on Wednesday, 7 October. We will do so at the Royal Society of Victoria, the new home of the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust, which supports this annual publication and Fellowship. This is a free event, starting at 6 pm, but This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Seymour Biography Lecture

ABR’s long association with the Seymour Biography Lecture continues this month when it co-presents Robert Drewe with the National Library of Australia. His theme will be the complex business of writing a memoir. The National Library is about to publish Drewe’s latest book: The Beach: An Australian Passion.

The Seymour Lecture is scheduled for Thursday, 17 September (6 pm), at the National Library. Robert Drewe will repeat it at Boyd on Wednesday, 11 November. Both of these are free events. Reservations are essential: the Seymour always books out quickly. To reserve your seat at the Boyd event, click This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Stow redivivus

In our survey this month, several critics lament the virtual disappearance or neglect of some masterly novelists. Randolph Stow’s critical reputation remains high, but how many people actually read him?

There is no excuse not to revisit Stow with the publication of five welcome reissues in the Text Classics series, all wildly attainable at just $16.99. They carry thoughtful introductions: The Girl Green as Elderflower (Kerryn Goldsworthy), To the Islands (Bernadette Brennan), Tourmaline (Gabrielle Carey), and Visitants (Drusilla Modjeska). This month, with permission from Text Publishing and the author, we reproduce Michelle de Kretser’s introduction to The Suburbs of Hell, with this caveat: Michelle de Kretser’s appreciation was written as an Afterword and contains spoilers.

Meanwhile, Stowians can enjoy a photo essay of Randolph Stow at Forrest River Mission in 1957, accompanied by Kate Leah Rendell’s essay ‘Encountering “Magnificent Country”’. Westerly 60.1, co-edited by Lucy Dougan and Paul Clifford, was the last to be published before the official start of its new Editor, Catherine Noske.

Where to start with Fever of Animals? The narrator of Miles Allinson’s début novel is hardly certain where to begin his story. Throughout this curious book, the difficulties of composition are paramount. ‘And what is this book I am supposed to be writing? Am I even writing a book or am I fooling myself, as I fooled myself so many times in the past, when I pretended for such a long time to be a painter, for instance?’ To answer these questions, Fever of Animals impersonates a memoir, a diary, and an almost conventional Bildungsroman about an ardent young Australian abroad.

A former artist named Miles is the narrator of most of Fever of Animals. Occasionally, he is absorbed into a third-person narrative, as if swallowed by the story he is trying to tell. He is writing a book about a long-dead Romanian surrealist painter named Emil Bafdescu – but that story summons a sheaf of other stories.

Another beginning to Fever of Animals is a painting by Bafdescu that hangs in a Melbourne restaurant that is yoked to Miles’s memory of his late father. We begin again with the narrator’s university years in Melbourne and with the blossoming and decline of his relationship with a woman named Alice. We follow this antipodean cosmopolitan on his travels in Europe and South America, and we stay with him as the desire to glean information about Bafdescu (so that he can start the book) emerges as a guiding imperative.

One of the most potent stories we can tell is a story of migration. With the exception of indigenous people, every Australian originally came from somewhere else. Take just one source: the emigrants from England. Kate Grenville writes about her convict and settler ancestry in her Secret River trilogy; in The Golden Age, Joan London writes of European refugees in Perth in the 1950s, a time she can remember as a child; and now a much younger writer, Stephanie Bishop (the subject of this month’s Future Tense), takes as her theme a ‘ten-pound Pom’ migration in the 1960s, in a story based on the memories and experiences of her grandparents.

What these stories have in common is a sense of the other side of the world as ambiguous, unsettling, even alienating. You can so easily escape one set of problems only to be confronted with a new set – or the same old problems in a different guise. And when a couple or a family makes the move, the experience can tug at each individual in radically different ways, putting new strains on the relationship.

From the opening pages of Mireille Juchau’s new novel, The World Without Us, we know we are in the hands of a poetic writer in control of language and ready to invest every sentence with resonant detail. In this scene, two of the central characters encounter each other at a river above a waterfall:

Now the water was strung with reflected clouds, and the canopy, backlit, was dark as the earth. This world, two hundred and fifty above sea-level, inverted. The river beyond his reckoning. It seemed as cryptic as the woman readying herself to swim in it.

Like her brilliant earlier novel, Burning In (2007), this novel addresses the grief of several characters who have lost family members, and it offers language and art as partial consolation. In this case, climate change and the destruction of nature seem to echo the personal concerns of the characters, and the likeness of the novel’s cover to that of James Bradley’s more future-centred Clade (2015) suggests that it may be an addition to the growing number of fictions warning us about a damaged future. Bee hives figure on both covers – and within both novels the decline of bee populations serves as a symptom of the crisis in nature.

‘How did you even begin to fit two adult lives together so that they happily resembled a whole?’ Jonathan Lott, the main character in Susan Johnson’s tenth novel, asks himself. It is giving little away to say that by book’s end there are no definitive answers. But Jonathan’s attempts to make sense of his wife Sarah’s defection from their decades-long marriage are at the core of The Landing. Here is one Lott who tries hard not to look back, and sometimes fails.

Jonathan is not isolated in his aloneness, his questioning and questing. Penny Collins is divorced from her ‘reliably negative ex-husband’, Pete, who has returned to live nearby after spending six months in Paris. Penny lives next to Rosanna Raymond, who is also alone after her husband, Paul, took up with Penny’s then nineteen-year-old daughter, Scarlett, with whom he has fathered two children. And Anna, daughter of retired GP and one-time ‘pants man’ Gordie, has returned from Britain to The Landing after her fourth marriage ended. The much abandoned and put-upon Penny does have the company of her mother, Marie – also alone after losing her beloved husband many years before, still attractive in her late eighties, and whose French background has long seen her lording it over provincial Australians and Penny in particular. It all sounds a bit Last Days of Chez Nous, or like French farce, but the novel is filled with characters who have failed to remain part of ‘a whole’.

Consider the following statements: unregulated markets achieve the best outcomes for society; ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’; government intervention, regulation, and redistribution damage economic growth; tax cuts for the rich are a reliable way to foster growth; financial market innovations create growth and benefit society. Anyone who still believes these statements hasn’t been paying attention for the last seven years. Anyone who believed them before the GFC hadn’t been reading Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Stiglitz’s focus on inequality was inspired by having been present, as a twenty-year-old student, at Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and he wears his politics on his sleeve. But this self-edited collection of the Nobel Laureate’s writings for several US journals over the last few years offers more than political opinion pieces. When he describes the above statements as ‘self-serving, ignorant falsehoods’, his arguments are well-supported by evidence, as well as having a satisfying punchiness of their own. His alternative formulation would include: inequality reduces growth and endangers social cohesion; unregulated markets seldom serve the interests of society at large; you can’t grow an economy by taking money away from the poor, who spend everything they can, and by giving more to the rich, who don’t; failing to provide the best possible education to everyone reduces an economy’s long-term potential; financial markets are rent-seeking, create no value for the economy at large, and actively damage it by increasing risk and diverting talent.

The collection is informed by a heartfelt lament for the loss of the American dream. Contrary to the nation’s self-image and aspiration, accident of birth is a more powerful determinant of outcomes in today’s America than in any other developed economy, and it is harder for a child born to poor parents to get ahead in the United States than virtually anywhere else. Opportunity in America is now inherited. Stiglitz hates this.

Operating in the shadows, security agencies usually have indifferent reputations. Their very nature prevents them from fully explaining themselves. At least some of their activities, if exposed to full scrutiny, would not enhance their reputations. There is a need for security agencies, yet the nature and scope of their role, powers, and responsibilities are contestable. In addition, the closed and secretive nature of these organisations can sit uncomfortably with the transparency and accountability which are, or should be, characteristic of liberal democratic government.

In Australia Under Surveillance, Frank Moorhouse examines the role of ASIO in Australia. The book represents more than a decade of thinking, research, and writing about national security and a lifetime of interest in ASIO. However longstanding Moorhouse’s interest in ASIO might be, ASIO’s interest in him is probably older: ASIO opened a file on Moorhouse when he was seventeen years old. That was during the Cold War. The threat posed to Australia’s national security has changed since then, from communism to Islamic fundamentalism. Whether it is a change merely to the source of the threat or whether it is genuinely different in kind, with Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh being more serious, is debatable. Moorhouse points out that the current debates about national security emphasise the particularity of the threat posed to Western democracies by Islamic fundamentalism. It may be more useful to consider the continuity of the threats presented, on multiple fronts, over several decades, to the West.

There are two broad approaches to reading Alberto Manguel’s Curiosity. The first type of reader will study the book – or rather, the text – assiduously connecting the personal narratives that introduce each chapter with the books Manguel references in the more theoretical and discursive aspects that follow. Dante’s Commedia is a constant presence in Curiosity, so they will have their Dante in easy reach for ready consultation, and they will strive to connect Dante’s journey with Manguel’s chapter titles, all of them questions: ‘How Do We Reason?’, ‘What Is Language?’, ‘What Is an Animal?’, ‘What Comes Next?’. They will make notes as they read, in an attempt to harness the voluminous material. And they will keep a separate list of the surprisingly numerous literary references that are unknown to them. This type of reader will try to get on top of the material, bring it to heel, master it.

The second type of reader will plunge in. They will not feel the ground beneath them, rather, they will be swept up in Manguel’s narrative. As Virgil guides Dante, and Dante guides Manguel, so Manguel guides this type of reader. It is an unpredictable journey. In the first chapter alone, ‘What Is Curiosity?’, Manguel saunters from Dante to Thomas Aquinas; he makes a quick digression to Augustine and Aristotle, before slipping past Dante to David Hume and Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Diderot’s co-editor of the Encyclopédie (I had always thought Diderot did the job alone); there are nods to Boccaccio, Isaiah Berlin, Seneca, Socrates, and several others like Covarrubias (a Spanish lexicographer who wrote an etymological dictionary in 1611), previously unknown to this reader. This is a journey without an itinerary. A risky odyssey, it is impossible to anticipate where Manguel is heading. But this second type of reader, trusting that Manguel knows what he is doing, goes with the current. These readers are so immersed in Manguel’s wanderings that they might be in a trance as they read – this book is their entire reality. They are prickling with awareness, in a world bathed in a golden, if sometimes opaque, light. These readers are guided by Manguel, but, at the same time, they are nudged along by books they have read themselves, experiences they have had, and thoughts and ideas surface without warning.

Does a law change the way people behave and think? Can it accelerate a shift in cultural norms? These are some of the questions that emerge from this reflection on Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (1975).

Tim Soutphommasane is hardly a disinterested commentator, since he owes his current job as Racial Discrimination Commissioner to the very act that he is writing about. So this is a sympathetic account of the act’s history and operation. It is not, however, a bland catalogue of achievement or a defensive response to those who see the act as an attempt to legislate away freedom of thought and expression. Soutphommasane responds to such detractors, and to other more nuanced critics, but does so in a reasoned and thoughtful way. What is on offer here is an informed and intelligent effort to grapple with complex issues and debates.

Soutphommasane’s training as a philosopher shines through, but he wears his scholarship lightly. He captures and conveys the evolution of complex ideas with clarity and precision. He places the Racial Discrimination Act in context with a succinct historical account of race in Australia, discussion of the race powers in the constitution (of particular relevance in the push for constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians), the evolution of international human rights law, contemporaneous developments like the US campaign for civil rights and the political contests of the Whitlam era.

Why do you write?

To find out what I think. To understand myself. To forage in the chaos and murkiness of my subconscious, grasp hold of the difficult stuff, drag it into the light, and shape it into something beautiful.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes! I have great epic sweeping adventure dreams; psychic battles, chases, quests. I wake up exhausted.

Where are you happiest?

At a boisterous dinner table, in the kitchen or the garden.

What drew you to writing?

I can’t remember not writing – it is something I have always done. As a teenager I was strongly encouraged by some wonderful teachers and started to become much more serious about it. I have always felt this need, this pressure, to translate experience into language.

You could call central casting for a debonair man of letters, but they’d never send someone as perfect for the role as Gore Vidal. By the time the stylish, sharp-witted – and yes, Hollywood-handsome – Vidal turned twenty-one, he had already served as first mate on a US supply ship in the Aleutian Islands during World War II and published a novel about the experience. With Williwaw (1946), Vidal marshalled in a new generation of writer–veterans that would come to include Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Kurt Vonnegut. Their work dominated the American literary landscape for decades. Among them, Vidal – cultural critic, novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, television personality, actor, occasional politician, and public intellectual – proved to be the most diverse and prescient. In his engaging new biography of Vidal, novelist and biographer Jay Parini separates the writer from the cult of personality.

Vidal arrived ready not for one role but for many. When he died, aged eighty-six in 2012, he left behind more than fifty books. His dozen screenplays include Ben-Hur (uncredited), Suddenly, Last Summer, and Is Paris Burning? Vidal’s plays Visit to a Small Planet and The Best Man were Broadway hits. In historical novels such as Julian, Burr, and Lincoln, he widened the possibilities of contemporary biographical fiction in ways that foreshadowed Flaubert’s Parrot and The Paris Wife. His other fiction (‘inventions’, as opposed to ‘reflections’), such as Myra Breckinridge and Kalki, competes with the postmodernist experimentations of Barth and Barthelme and the nouveau roman products of Robbe-Grillet.

I sit in a safe room with the winter sun on my back and read of violence and menace in an icy city. Gail Jones’s Berlin is so bleak and the novel’s dénouement so shattering that I need that brief benign warmth. This is not, I hasten to protest, a spoiler: the book begins by foreshadowing a scene of guilt, shock, and death, to which the novel’s action then gradually unfolds.

Jones’s oeuvre is steeped in intertextuality and imbued with the movement of literary currents and personal bonds across cultures. Her last novel, Five Bells (2011), was infused not only with Kenneth Slessor’s poem but with the shades of other writers. A Guide to Berlin is a variation on this, making the literary debt explicit, not only in the title.

Vladimir Nabokov is the guiding spirit of A Guide to Berlin, as would be immediately apparent to the initiated. He is there at every level, in the title which echoes that of his story, in the texture and pace of the prose, in the lugubrious edginess of the plot, and as the reason why the six characters meet. All are visiting Berlin: Victor, a middle-aged Jewish American academic; a young Japanese couple, Yukio and Mitsuko, both writers; two Italian men in their thirties, Gino and Marco; and the Australian Cass, a twenty-six-year-old would-be writer. They form a group, brought together by Marco, ‘inspired and compelled by a shared interest in the work of Vladimir Nabokov’. At the first of the meetings that she attends they begin ‘a “speak-memory” game, in which each would introduce themselves with a densely remembered story or detail’.

One by one the Shetlands had emptied. Father said we had to make ourselves known or we were next. He was trying to get into the Scottish Stud Book and Elector was his answer. I didn’t care. I just wanted to ride Chicken.

It takes more than half an hour to put on all the layers of the dry suit. First the woollen thermals, then the thick undersuit and the neoprene seals around the neck and wrists. Finally, the membrane shell. All this before we even look for the hole in the ice. By the time we hit the water we are as plump and blubber-thick as the more cold-adapted creatures: seals, whales, little penguins that leave trails of bubbles blurred behind them like a zoetrope strip. Pierre calls it our sumo suit, the ‘Japanese Squeeze’. Will tells him it’s the closest Pierre’s ever got to an exotic embrace. Pierre says he is innocent and pure and doesn’t want to know about Will’s sordid carry-on. We’ve been working together so long that this kind of thing seems funny. When we step off the Zodiac onto the ice, we move like one gangly animal. We scan the horizon and sniff the air. The centre of gravity low in our bodies, every bit of us on high alert to feel if the frozen sheet bends at our step. There are no shadows here. It makes it hard to see what we’re looking for: a place where the ice opens and we can slip down into the hanging cathedral beneath.

I trace my encounters with time travel to perdurantism and poetry. In the spring of 1981, I was appointed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado to probe a wormhole, an undertaking of ambitious design which would allow information to travel faster than the speed of light. As the universe was changing, the preparations were endless. Our project was classified as high-level security. I was briefed by officials from the FBI and CIA. My colleagues were the Sino-American physicist Chen Kwong and the Iranian statistician Hamid Husseini, with whom lengthy conferences and memoranda on the prospects for manipulating gravity and electromagnetic fields ensued. At last we dissected down to the bare bones of a strategy, forestalling every theoretical hitch. We would simultaneously send data to two villages in New Mexico separated by sixty-three kilometres. I had furnished myself adequately for the task, exhausting the existing research on nano-technology, loop models, and data algorithms, not to mention the elementary training of my post-doctorate in modal counterparts. I cannot diminish the accretions of pedagogy, but what most mesmerised and inspired me arrived as a package wrapped in crenulated brown paper and tied with twine.

My copy of The Suburbs of Hell (1984) is a handsome Heinemann first edition salvaged, like so many treasures, from a remainder tray. The dust jacket features a golden hourglass and type on a sky-blue ground: the colours Fra Angelico favoured for the vaults of heaven. A travel card that served as my bookmark is still tucked away in its pages; the date-punch informs me that I first read the book in October 1985.

Whenever I want to re-read the novel I have difficulty locating it. I know the shelf it sits on – not an especially crowded one – but my eye keeps gliding past the book. When I finally isolate it, the glorious blue and gold always brings a little jolt. I’ve been looking for a black jacket, one that matches my recollection of a devastating tale.

Randolph Stow dedicated his ninth and last novel to William Grono, an old friend from Western Australia, ‘twenty years after “The Nedlands Monster”’. The Nedlands Monster was a serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, who murdered eight people in Perth and attempted to murder many more. In one horrific night in 1963 Cooke shot five people, among them the teenage brother of a friend of Stow’s. Stow was out of the country at the time but returned shortly afterwards to a city gripped by rumour and fear. The Suburbs of Hell bears witness to the hold of these events on the novelist’s imagination, as well as to the imaginative alchemy that has transformed a murder hunt into something far more rich and strange.

Penguin is synonymous with publishing: a firm of vast influence and market share, whose ‘Classics’ imprint essentially arbitrates the modern canon. The founding myth goes something like this: Allen Lane, eccentric genius and publisher, was standing on a railway platform after a weekend with his chum, Agatha Christie. In want of a decent, cheap read, he visited a platform bookshop and found the selection lacking. From this came the brainwave for a publishing revolution: quality writing, in paperback, at an accessible price.

It is a rosy anecdote, perpetuated by Penguin. According to Stuart Kells, however, the story is bunk. Kells’s new book, Penguin and the Lane Brothers, is a revisionist early history of the firm via a biography of its founding brothers – Allen, Richard, and John. Kells persuasively corrects the imbalance in the extant biographies and histories, which focus on Allen, and presents the neglected but vital contribution of his younger siblings.

Kells begins in boyhood. Growing up in a happy, eccentric household, Allen and Richard developed a strong bond as they explored woods carpeted in bluebells and collected ‘wild rooks’ eggs’. In their teens, the brothers forged disparate paths that would, ultimately, lead them towards creating the great publishing house. ‘Uncle John’ Lane, Oscar Wilde’s publisher and owner of The Bodley Head, needed an heir. Instead of bookish Richard, Uncle John chose Allen (who was more interested in the neighbours’ daughters). While Allen built a reputation in London as a dapper, hard-partying publisher, Richard went to South Australia as an apprentice fruit farmer. After a sea-crossing amongst ‘violent drunks, men held in irons’, Richard began a hard life on the land – living in a hessian lean-to next to the shit-bucket (‘At night, he could hear the rustling of maggots’), and working a ‘snake-infested’ farm for a brutal master. Later, he set up a car service, driving passengers through ‘unmarked and unsignposted tracks in the wild sand and scrub’. Richard pined for books and culture, and the absence of the same in 1920s rural Australia made him realise that ‘I am far more interested in books than rams’.

‘If there are going to be any more of her novels, perhaps we should come right out and promote her as an utter bitch?’

So wrote Alec Bolton, the London manager of Angus & Robertson, to his senior editor John Abernethy in Sydney. The novelist in question was Thea Astley, and the book was A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968). Bolton had optimistically sent a copy of this bleak and savage novel to Christina Stead for comment; Stead, no pussycat herself, had some positive things to say but also referred to the novel’s ‘frenzied cruel pursuit … of old maids [and] the contempt for middle-aged married men’.

Early success is no guarantee of a book’s continued availability or circulation. Some major and/or once-fashionable authors recede from public consciousness, and in some cases go out of print. We invited some writers and critics to identity novelists who they feel should be better known.

Debra Adelaide

Helen de Guerry Simpson was a successful novelist, poet, playwright, broadcaster, and musician. She left Australia at the age of sixteen but returned for visits. Several of her books were set partially or fully in Australia, including the acclaimed historical novel Under Capricorn (1937), which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1949. For me, her most remarkable novel is Boomerang (1932), which is quintessentially Australian in its ironic voice and its wry dramatisation of such things as Catholic–Protestant rivalries, small-town prejudices, and parochialism. Full of surprises, it develops into a sweeping blend of family history, fiction, and romance set from the 1780s to World War I, and ends with the narrator discovering love in the most unlikely circumstances, amid the desolate battlefields of the Somme. If only for its brilliant use of the boomerang metaphor, this novel and its author should be better remembered.

Bernadette Brennan

Joseph Furphy, Such is Life (Angus & Robertson, 1986 edition)Naming a single novelist whom I think should be better known is extremely difficult, but I will go out on a limb: Joseph Furphy (or should that be Tom Collins?). Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903) is an erudite, extremely funny, and rollicking read. Gabrielle Carey attends a Finnegans Wake reading group; Helen Garner attends one on Virgil. Such Is Life would come to all its vibrant, baffling, hilarious glory in such a setting. At the very least it deserves to be read aloud. Furphy described the novel as ‘temper democratic; bias, offensively Australian’. He wears his literary learning lightly, his opinions less so. Shakespeare, Sterne, Zola, the Bible, and the English monarchy sit alongside a cross-dressing Australian shepherd, lost children, bullockies, and drovers’ dogs. Sectarian, class, and gendered tensions, philosophical musings, and tales of lost love, all find voice under the stars out on the Riverina. Excised chapters of the original manuscript were redrafted and published as Rigby’s Romance (1946) and Buln-buln and the Brolga (1948). Such Is Life may not be the easiest read, but I will always be grateful that I was introduced to the novels of Joseph Furphy.

Geraldine Brooks

Tony Morphett, best known as a television writer and author of young adult fiction, in 1969 wrote a remarkable novel titled Thorskald, about an Australian artist, whose life is unfolded from multiple points of view.  It is beautifully constructed, with luscious descriptions of painting, the art-making process, and Australian bohemia of the 1950s and 1960s. I loved it when I first read it in my mid-teens. It has been out of print for many years, and Morphett himself does not list it on his website. 

Gregory Day

As the literatures of the mid-twentieth century became increasingly urbanised and internationalised, George Mackay Brown, through illness and shyness, lived a local life in the independent and dramatic weather of the Orkney Islands. His fiction and poetry are a freakish reticulation of historical and elemental voices, rife with the luminosity and high jinks of the Scandinavian sagas, as well as the social exposure of contemporary island life.

Brown suffered from what Auden called topophilia – or place-love. After a brief foray at university in Edinburgh, he returned to the Orkneys and stayed put. The islands had been his first book and now they became his creative foundry. As his work won acclaim, many writers made the pilgrimage to see him, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney among them. They found a generous man whose body of work seems more relevant than ever in our hyper-connective yet disconnected world.

Ian Donaldson

Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street (Penguin edition)Henry James believed that Sinister Street (1913–14) was the most remarkable book written by a young author in his lifetime, and its author, Compton Mackenzie, the most promising English novelist of his generation. Scott Fitzgerald ‘idolised’ the novel; Ford Madox Ford thought it ‘possibly a work of real genius’; and the young George Orwell read it with surreptitious admiration – the sexual scenes were considered strong stuff – at his preparatory school. When I first encountered this huge, prolix, but extremely readable work more than fifty years ago (while at Magdalen College, Oxford, where the central chapters of the novel are set), it was still a popular Penguin title, and Mackenzie himself a prominent figure in the British literary landscape. These days the novel, like its author, is barely known. A brilliant television adaptation – the last was by Ray Lawler in 1969 – might help to revive its fortunes.

Anna Funder

Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children is perhaps the most brilliant achievement in Australian literature, but it has had a hard life since its publication in 1940. It suffered a trans-Pacific displacement of setting from Sydney to Washington, DC. And it has suffered from the chronic and, as ever, unacknowledged doubt that something as brilliant could come from a woman. Women are not expected to be as chillingly clever as Stead is, as warm and funny, as stupendously, miraculously verbal. They are not expected to have the broad view as well as the narrow, the deft control of plot. Nor, to be fair, are most men – apart from Tolstoy. Yet here we have a book that matches Tolstoy in ambition and greatness – and concomitant grand messiness.

Andrea Goldsmith

W. Somerset Maugham’s work is still in print, but this once-popular writer is no longer fashionable or much read. He is thought to be too middle-class, too in thrall to empire, too British. He is all these things, but he’s so much more.

The structure, pace, and narrative force of Maugham’s short stories are the work of a master. He is a consummate storyteller, whether in short or long form. Of Human Bondage (1915) is perhaps the best novel of obsessive love ever written. Cakes and Ale (1930), with its insider’s portrayal of literary fame and envy, is a gem. The Razor’s Edge (1944) is a subtle yet complex story of a privileged young man in search of spiritual meaning. His notebooks and The Summing Up (1938) are essential reading for all writers.

Maugham’s fiction is timeless with its focus on enduring human concerns like love, desire, prejudice, the powerlessness of childhood, and the situation of women. He merits his metre of shelf in my library.

Rodney Hall

Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris, first published in 1935, casts an immediate spell. Every moment of the book is lived intensely. The scale is extremely small, which magnifies the impact. Two children, previously unknown to one another, spend a single day in a house in Paris. Their paths cross in transit to other destinations. The subtlety and vividness of portraiture is astonishing. Even the simplest sentences are fraught with meaning. ‘He noted her nearness without noticing her.’ The nine-year-old boy and the eleven-year-old girl assert themselves in each other’s company with forensic good manners. Heart-stoppingly aware of vulnerability, they ward off their fears and hopes alike. Elizabeth Bowen reveals the self-awareness of all her characters with penetrating subtlety and (in some cases) savage wit. The tone and tension are perfectly sustained.

Sonya Hartnett

Lee Harding, Displaced Persons (Puffin Plus, 1980 edition)When I was a teenager it was possible to buy a copy of Lee Harding’s 1979 young adult novel Displaced Person in every opportunity shop between Melbourne and Brisbane. I know, because I often bought a copy somewhere along the highway on our annual Christmas road trips. Now, it is rarer than hens’ teeth, and even my own copies have vanished, which seems fitting, given that the book, a short novel adapted from an even shorter story, is about a young man who gradually fades from the real world into a grey, underlying realm of overlooked or forgotten objects and people. Harding won the 1980 Australian Children’s Book of the Year for this strange, inventive, remorseless and touching novel, which I have found unforgettable. Decades later, whenever I misplace something, I unfailingly think of it as having dropped into Harding’s ‘lost moment of time’.

Gail Jones

Barbara Hanrahan (1939–91) deserves election to the class of writers-whom-we-must-preserve. Adelaide-born and raised, she made her suburb of Thebarton the special territory of her first novel, The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973). In this astonishing book it is the minute and the hidden, the modest and the particular, that compose the dense life-world of a child growing in the presence of her mother, grandmother, and great-aunt (afflicted with Down syndrome). What does this child see? The hair in her grandmother’s nostril, her mother grunting into stockings, the frog-like eyes and snout of her aunt, which make her feel ashamed, grasshoppers, pleated skirts, handkerchiefs folded into triangles ... She has a fear of the dark and the outdoor lavatory. She knows and sees everything. Here, preserved in fastidious and undiscriminating detail is an entire era: feminine, vernacular, almost absurdly specific. No other first novel in Australia has ever matched this one.

Susan Lever

There is no mystery about the fiction of Dal Stivens fading into obscurity. He published hundreds of short stories but only three novels, years apart, and the most consistent feature of his work is an ironic, comic, sometimes whimsical attitude. Though Jimmy Brockett: Portrait of a Notable Australian (1951) is currently in print in the SUP Classics series, the more postmodern A Horse of Air (1970) seems to have disappeared from library shelves. At least one of his short stories (usually the unrepresentative ‘The Pepper Tree’) can be found in most Australian short story anthologies, but his short fables were labelled ‘tall stories’ in an old tradition, before magical realism became fashionable. I recommend Jimmy Brockett for its ambiguous and entertaining depiction of an enduring Australian type, and A Horse of Air for its intimations that postmodernist play could exist in advance of its official label.

Brian Matthews

The name Francis Stuart is rarely heard in contemporary literary discussion. As the author of about twenty-four novels, he represents a solid reading challenge. But at least three of this daunting output are worth resurrecting: The Pillar of Cloud (1948), Redemption (1949), and Black List, Section H (1971). Of these, the autobiographical Black List is stunning. Married to Maud Gonne’s daughter, Iseult, combative friend of Colm Tóibín, encouraged though also corrosively criticised by W.B. Yeats, resident in Berlin from 1940 to 1945, sometime IRA functionary, briefly an admirer of Hitler, Stuart had plenty of extraordinary autobiography to rework. Encountering Black List, which Tóibín says ‘arose from something darkly and deeply rooted in his psyche – the need to betray and be seen to betray’, was like reading 1984 or Crime and Punishment for the first time. Once you began, you plunged compulsively on, preferably nonstop.

Peter Rose

Rodney Hall, Captivity Captive (Farrar Straus Giroux, first edition, 1988)Twenty-seven years ago, when it was first published, it would have seemed inconceivable that Australian readers might within a generation need to be reminded of the luminous qualities of Rodney Hall’s novel Captivity Captive, yet the book has long been out of print. My esteemed predecessor Helen Daniel would have thundered at the thought.

There are hammer-blows in Hall’s novel – three of them. In this and in its poeticism, Captivity Captive seems our most Faulknerian novel, and as with Faulkner we learn from every sentence, while shuddering away from some of them. The book might have been written in a day – one inspired day. Veronica Brady, in a brilliant review for ABR (9/88), remarked that this short book ‘ranges through heaven, hell and purgatory’. She concluded: ‘This, then, is a generous novel. But it is one which demands an equal generosity from its readers, heart-work as well as head-work.’

Novels of this stature come along once a decade, at most. We neglect them – patronise them – at our peril.

Susan Sheridan

The fiction of Thea Astley was undergoing an eclipse from public consciousness, as often happens in the immediate aftermath of a writer’s death, when Karen Lamb’s biography, Inventing Her Own Weather (UQP), appeared this year (read Kerryn Goldsworthy's review of it here). It is to be hoped that this event will prompt people to read or re-read Astley’s innovative novels, especially the major later works Beachmasters, It’s Raining in Mango, The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, and Drylands. In these powerful fables of colonialism and its aftermaths, Astley’s darkly comic sensibility, working through her witty metaphorical language and shifting narrative voices, makes you laugh and gasp with horror simultaneously – and see life in Australia today with fresh eyes.

Geordie Williamson

J.G. Ballard said of James Hamilton-Paterson that ‘strangeness lifts off his pages like a rare perfume’. A poet, novelist, travel writer, satirist, and foreign correspondent who lives between Austria, Tuscany and (until recent years) The Philippines, Hamilton-Paterson is the kind of true eccentric Bruce Chatwin spent many fruitful decades impersonating. His novel Gerontius (1989), which followed Edward Elgar on his 1923 trip on the Amazon, won fans such as Michael Ondaatje, while Barry Humphries observed of the prose in Hamilton-Paterson’s novel Griefwork (1993), about the relationship between a botanist and glasshouse keeper, that it was ‘writing with a capital W’.

Hamilton-Paterson’s more recent trilogy of waspish black comedies, starting with Cooking with Fernet Branca (2004), almost threatened to make him known to a wider audience. But he is too diffuse in his gifts for that, and too bloody-minded in his independence. There is no work by Hamilton-Paterson that does not have some tincture of pure music in it. Nor is there any work that doesn’t face full-square the Conradian horror and wonder of the world.