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.)

In The Season, Helen Garner describes a photograph of Australian Football League player Charlie Curnow celebrating a goal: ‘It’s Homeric: all the ugly brutality of a raging Achilles, but also this strange and splendid beauty.’ There is a mythic image in Australian culture of the AFL player doing battle on the football oval with the strength of Hercules or the wit of Odysseus. Brandon Jack’s Pissants, his first novel, is an inversion of this mythopoeia; it is an exposé of football culture, the false pluralism of Australian masculinity, and a deranged form of identity that runs through ‘the club’. It shows the average life of a footballer at the fringes of a team list. Jack, having played for the AFL’s Sydney Swans from 2013 to 2017, has firsthand experience of the (in)famous ‘Bloods Culture’ – one built on a mantra of self-sacrifice, discipline, and unity – and this experience shows throughout the novel.

Zoom in. The most unusual detail in this painting is the left hand, with tattooed dots carefully spaced across its back and knuckles. The fingers themselves are poorly done. The thumb and pointer are folded into the figure’s thick cloth folds, but the other three digits lie on the material like tapered slugs. Today they might be held up as evidence of AI image generation – bad hands are the quickest tell. In the eighteenth century, to the initiated, bad hands were a sign that the work came from the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Soon after the conclusion of the 1948 Arnhem Land expedition, its leader, Charles Pearcy Mountford, an ethnologist and filmmaker, was celebrated by the National Geographic Society, a key sponsor of the expedition, along with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the Commonwealth Department of Information. In presenting Mountford with the Franklin L. Burr Prize and praising his ‘outstanding leadership’, the Society effectively honoured his success in presenting himself as the leader of a team of scientists working together in pursuit of new frontiers of knowledge. But this presentation is best read as theatre. The expedition’s scientific achievements were middling at best and, behind the scenes, the turmoil and disagreement that had characterised the expedition continued to rage.

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

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).

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.

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.

Suitcase red girl teenager together

New space time moving thataway

Farewell waving family people mindset