But it is the end of the world to River, who’s standing there
thrown by its incomprehensibilities as I play him R.E.M.,
which is otherwise what he needs, total sleep and churning dreams,
not the drums, distortion and irony, he does not feel fine,

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.

After the horror of war, the difficulty of return – angry seas, lost comrades, plotters at home. Daniel Mendelsohn teaches at Bard College and writes for The New York Review of Books. His compelling new translation of the Odyssey acknowledges the themes of this story have been repeated over millennia: separation, trials, and reunion.

In his otherwise bleak 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré lets himself have a little fun with the character of Elizabeth Gold. She is an idealistic Jewish woman in her mid-twenties who works in a small library in the London neighbourhood of Bayswater. She is also a member of the British Communist Party. For Liz, however, membership is less a matter of ideology than a token of her moral commitment to peace work and the alleviation of poverty. She is disdainful of her local branch, with its petty ambitions to be ‘a decent little club, nice and revolutionary and no fuss’ – unlike her comrades in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), whose determined struggle against the militarism and decadence of the capitalist West she admires from afar.

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.

Two distinguished professors have joined forces to write an impassioned book about the recent, concerted attacks on science. While they both live and work in the United States, where what they describe as the ‘forces of darkness’ are most active and influential, the problem they describe is truly global. Mann is a celebrated climate scientist who has been a leading voice in the field since the 1980s, while Hotez is a virologist who became involved in the public debate about the Covid-19 pandemic. The central argument of the book is that we face existential crises in both human health and the health of our planet. While the best hope of successfully tackling these challenges relies on science, there is now ‘politically and ideologically motivated opposition to science’, threatening both our ability to advance understanding of these complex issues and, equally important, the freedom of scientists to communicate their understanding.

Suitcase red girl teenager together

New space time moving thataway

Farewell waving family people mindset

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.

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.’