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

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.

The death of the white male novelist, lately the subject of a fistful of literary think-pieces, has been greatly exaggerated. Yet it is a truth widely acknowledged that such authors now lack much of the cultural cachet that they once brazenly wielded. The challenge for these writers has been to transmute themselves into narrative subjects more palatable to the sensibilities of a shifting readership. Some continue to doggedly write self-adjacent fictions; others have willed a kind of metamorphosis, their subjectivities transposed or otherwise suppressed. Then there are those that try to do both. In the case of Rhett Davis’s Arborescence, this results in a novel with a striking elevator pitch: it is about people turning into trees.

Living alongside the world’s only native black swans, Australians should be more alive to the provisional nature of truth than most. For thousands of years of European history, the ‘fact’ that ‘all swans are white’ was backed up with an overwhelming data set that only the delusional – or a philosopher – would debate. But as Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out, the difficulty with inductive reasoning is that it can seem incontrovertible all the way up until it is not. But if the truth is always shifting, where do we find solid ground when our lives depend on it? And to what absolutes and experts can we refer in an era of wilful misinformation, institutional mistrust, and anti-expert populism?

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.

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.

Suitcase red girl teenager together

New space time moving thataway

Farewell waving family people mindset

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.

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. 

Jayne Tuttle’s The Sea in the Metro is the third book in a trilogy of memoirs about living, working, and becoming a mother in Paris. Like Paris or Die (2019) and My Sweet Guillotine (2022), Tuttle’s latest book applies a sharp scalpel to her own psyche while playing with genre. She explores the brutal realities of giving birth and raising a toddler in a foreign city, the seemingly impossible task of balancing motherhood with paid work, the joys and hardships of striving to be a capital ‘W’ writer while copywriting for cash, and what family might look like in brittle, Parisian culture. Tuttle also examines the complex ramifications of a near-death experience and a hospital birthing trauma on her ongoing physical and mental health – and intimate relationships.