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

Advances, like many in the literary community, was shocked to hear that Meanjin would be publishing its final issue in December. Australia’s second longest-running literary publication was founded in 1940, in Brisbane, where meanjin derives from the Yuggera word for a place in the river where trade and cultural exchange has taken place for thousands of years. 

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.’

On the steps of Federal Parliament, a scrum assembled. Reporters jostled for position, enraged members of the public shouted over one another, advisers stood with faces drained of composure – even a comedian was caught in the fray. At the centre stood the tall and imposing figure of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, listening as the governor-general’s official secretary read the proclamation dissolving Parliament. The moment, instantly mythic, would be remembered as ‘the dismissal’ – the most audacious constitutional rupture in Australian history, one that continues to haunt democratic life half a century on.

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.

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. 

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.

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.’

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

Apple is one of the world’s largest companies. Its market value reached $3 trillion in January 2022, having grown by more than $700 million per day since August 2011 when Tim Cook took over as Chief Executive Officer after an ailing Steve Jobs resigned. Apple began with Jobs and Steve Wozniak ‘tinkering in a garage’. Iconic products followed including the Mac, the iMac, the iPod, the iPad and, most successful of all, the iPhone. An early slogan aimed to align Apple with ‘the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.’ For a company experiencing huge growth, that image was often at odds with the day-to-day commercial reality.