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

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.

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,

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.

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.’

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).

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

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. 

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.