A wise scholar once advised me against using absolutes in historical writing. The first reason is functional. When you resort to words such as ‘everyone’, ‘everything’, and ‘nobody’, you invite trouble; most of the time you can find an exception. The second reason is more important. The use of such words can betray an approach that packages the messy past too neatly, where there is little room for nuance and even less for uncertainty. Confidence doesn’t necessarily produce the best results.

The unbelievable lacework of it all – the patterns and linkages, the flickerings of knowledge and mystery, the astonishing shapes – is what Anne Coombs’s Our Familiars: The meaning of animals in our lives explores. This is a family book; specifically, a multi-species family book. Intimacies made between bodies is the soil in which the work is grown. And it comes from a writer who spent a lifetime thinking about, writing for, and working towards companionship, co-operation, and the safety of others. It is a posthumous publication too; a work fed and raised by Coombs, but finished, edited, and carried into the world by Susan Varga, Anne’s partner of thirty-three years, and close friend Joyce Morgan. Coombs died in December 2021, not long after the Black Summer fires and the Covid-19 pandemic – a time when all our interdependencies were raging (as they continue to).

My career began at Australian Book Review, and as such I’ve been prompted to reflect on the importance of publications such as ABR to ensuring a robust critical culture in Australia in the wake of Meanjin’s closure. The decision was announced on September 4 that Meanjin, one of Australia’s longest-running literary journals, would cease to be published by its custodian, Melbourne University Publishing, and that the editor and I would be made redundant.

Who should we celebrate, or perhaps fault, for the publishing success of books labelled ‘outback noir’ in Australia over the past decade? Our starting point could be Jane Harper’s bestselling book The Dry (2016). The cornerstone of the genre for the author of The Leap, Paul Daley, is the seminal Kenneth Cook novel, Wake in Fright, first published in 1961. The longevity of the novel owes much to the 1971 feature film of the same name, directed by Ted Kotcheff, remembered for the infamous filming of a visceral Kangaroo shoot and the actor Donald Pleasence playing a most unpleasant lech. The Wolf Creek film franchise also deserves an honourable mention, along with its larrikin psychopathic killer, Mick Taylor, if not the real-life mass murderer, Ivan Milat himself.

Some literary biographies are best known for their gestation – or malgestation. Some authors, we might go further, should have a big sign around their neck – noli me tangere. Muriel Spark is one of them. Her voluminous archive, lovingly tended all her life, is full of booby traps. Twice she went into battle with biographers: first Derek Stanford, a former lover; then Martin Stannard, whose biography of Evelyn Waugh she had admired. 

In The Möbius Book, an ingenious merging of fact and fiction by American writer Catherine Lacey, Lacey recalls including in one of her pieces of short fiction a poem about growing up with ‘an angry man in your house … and if one day you find that there is / no angry man in your house – / well, you will go find one and invite him in!’ (The poem appears in Lacey’s stinging short story ‘Cut’, first published in The New Yorker in 2019.)

1.     worlds inside brown eyes
2.     a figure in a bed
3.     stars in summer
4.     women of clay

Outsiders, mostly white men seeking answers to burning existential questions, have long been ineluctably drawn to Australian deserts. The continental interior, with its deep-time mysteries, has lured not only explorers on fatal quests, but also lone anthropologists, philosophers, and other restless wanderers in search of themselves, burdened with their interrogations and yearnings for higher truth.

Can a ‘shortest history’ of Turkey, including the expansive history of the Ottoman Empire, work? As well as covering imperial grandeur, it must address complex and sensitive issues such as the Kurdish conflict, the Armenian genocide, Islamism, slavery, and autocracy. Benjamin C. Fortna, a Middle Eastern historian, successfully combines sympathy and interest in Turkey with a candid examination, including of darker aspects of its past.

These days, evenings are heavy
with clouds that refuse to crack, to open
a window is let in the night
creatures, which flutter and tumble
into the glow of a phone