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.

During the walk she takes with Michelle de Kretser along the Cooks River, the bit that snakes between Hurlstone Park and Tempe, Belinda Castles, the author of Walking Sydney, muses on the impact of Sydney’s geography. ‘On the footpath-climb to skirt the golf course,’ she writes, ‘the village-like nature of Sydney makes itself felt, the way suburbs are enclosed and cut off by ridges and valleys, cliffs and rivers, the tentacles of the harbour. A city’s form has an effect on thinking and ways of being.’

Sarah Moss’s tenth novel, Ripeness, charts the burden of bearing witness to tragedies, both personal and historical. At the heart of the story are two sisters from rural Ireland: Lydia, a ballerina, and Edith, a school-leaver due to commence a degree at Oxford. When Lydia falls pregnant, the girls’s mother charges Edith with the responsibility of assisting in the birth and overseeing the transfer of the baby into the care of his adoptive mother.

Suitcase red girl teenager together

New space time moving thataway

Farewell waving family people mindset

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.

For seven years after her 1963 burial, Sylvia Plath lay in an unmarked grave near St Thomas the Apostle Church in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. The gravestone, when it came, bore her birth and married names, Sylvia Plath Hughes, the years of her birth and death, and a line from Wu Cheng-en’s sixteenth-century novel Monkey King:Journey to the West: ‘Even amidst fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted.’

Ellen van Neerven is a writer and editor of Mununjali and Dutch heritage. Their books include Heat and Light (2014), Comfort Food (2016), Throat (2020), and Personal Score (2023). Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award, and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers’ Prize. Ellen’s second book, Comfort Food, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize and highly commended in the 2016 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. They live and write on unceded Yagera and Turrbal dhagun.

Omar Musa’s first novel, Here Come the Dogs (2014), is a rousing dramatisation of the combustible sense of displacement and dissatisfaction simmering at the underrepresented margins of Australian life. Its protagonists are singular and compelling: each is tender and violent, hopeful and despairing, pitiful and triumphant. They all possess a uniquely hybrid identity, and each is searching for something that is always out of reach.

Ilya Sutskever was feeling agitated. As Chief Scientist at OpenAI, the company behind the AI models used in ChatGPT and in Microsoft’s products, he was a passionate advocate for the company’s mission of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) before anybody else. OpenAI defines AGI as ‘highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work’, the development of which will benefit ‘all of humanity’. OpenAI’s mission, Sutskever believed, gave humanity its best chance of getting to AGI safely. But he worried about failing the mission. He fretted to his colleagues: What if bad actors came after its technology? What if they cut off his hand and slapped it on a palm scanner to access its secrets?

In a famous thought experiment based on the notion of ‘eternal return’, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asked what it would be like to live the same life over and over again, for eternity. Nietzsche’s intention was to set a kind of test that encourages us to consider whether we are living our best life, the life that makes us happiest.