Tim Howard

For once, it’s fine to judge a book by its cover. Stephen Ives’s busy image of Buster Keaton captures, in co-editor Lisa Greenaway’s words, ‘the essence of [Going Down Swinging] the slapstick/serious; the cultural ruckus; the unwavering stare’. Going Down Swinging is an unapologetic miscellany, distinguished by its vibrant eclecticism. This issue is divided more or less evenly between p ... (read more)

Stealing Picasso is an art heist caper based on the sensational theft in 1986 of Picasso’s Weeping woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. The crime, attributed to a nebulous gang of militant aesthetes calling themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists, remains unsolved. Anson Cameron, a Melbourne writer best known for the novel Tin Toys (2000), takes this historical loose end and runs w ... (read more)

‘Ice is everywhere,’ observes the narrator of Ice, Louis Nowra’s fifth novel, before succumbing to a bad case of the Molly Blooms and giving us a few pages of punctuation-free interior monologue. No wonder he’s so worked up: ice, in Ice, really is everywhere. It is subject, motif, organising principle, and all-purpose metaphor; it is death, life, stasis, progress; it is seven types of ambi ... (read more)

Ryle Winn was a rural valuer and jack of all trades before being laid low by a brain tumour in the mid-1990s. He turned to writing and produced a string of successful titles, including a memoir of his illness, Out of the Blue (2009), and numerous collections of bush yarns and personal anecdotes. ... (read more)