Culture

John Kinsella Watching Dulac’s La Coquille et le clergyman and thinking over my great-grandmother playing piano to accompany silent movies   I know this one wouldn’t have reached the picture houses of Perth, Western …

Miriam Cosic The art of Chiharu Shiota – now on show in a major survey in Brisbane – tackles ineffable questions about absence.

Neha Kale The style, wit and intelligence of Elaine Stritch have been beacons for comedian Rhys Nicholson.

Andy Hazel The film director has never aimed small – and few figures are bigger than Elvis Presley.

Mahmood Fazal

As the National Gallery of Victoria’s new exhibition reveals, Picasso believed that art was a kind of magic.

Chantal Nguyen

Bangarra’s vast hymn to Country shows the company has a bright future under incoming artistic director Frances Rings.

Stephen Romei It is a truth universally acknowledged that journalists start their careers in unexpected places. For Sydney-born Geraldine Brooks it was compiling the horse-racing results for the then Fairfax press. Some decades, five novels and an unexpected lunchtime …

Jack Cameron Stanton In Scott McCulloch’s debut novel Basin, an aimless nomad called Figure traverses an interminable landscape that feels similar to the impossible staircase in Escher’s lithograph Ascending and Descending. Figure roams the territories …

Nicola Harvey Dirt Town has a simple plot: a girl goes missing, two out-of-town detectives arrive and the father becomes a suspect. Hayley Scrivenor’s debut is billed as a crime novel but the multiple perspectives she employs to elevate a prosaic storyline …

Amal Awad “Being buried alive by social media hatred will force you to either construct impenetrable walls around your soul or quit completely.” So says Yassmin Abdel-Magied in her book Talking About a Revolution, a collection of essays old and new …

Jeff Sparrow Katharine Susannah Prichard published her first short story in 1899 and her final novel in 1967. At last we have a definitive biography, a book tracing her life and the formation of the Australian literary culture she helped to create. Nathan Hobby reminds …

Linda Jaivin When he wanted to send a secret message, the ancient Greek tyrant Histiaeus shaved the head of a slave, tattooed the message on his scalp and, once the hair had grown back, sent him on his way. In this story, Ellis Gunn finds a key metaphor for how patriarchal …