culture

In the short story “Sentimental Education”, Monica, a 19-year-old university student, asks her lover to flip his language around when discussing sex. She tells him: “In a matriarchy, you’d hear women boasting to their mates: ‘I subsumed him in my...

Philip Pullman found fame in the 1990s with the His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy. Now, the children who grew up with the heroine, Lyra, can revisit her as an adult in The Secret Commonwealth. The author talks about having his work adapted for the small screen, the dangers of single vision and the allure of dust. “We know we’re conscious, but philosophers are still struggling with what David Chalmers calls ‘the hard problem’ – how do we get from matter to consciousness? Once you accept that consciousness is a normal property of matter, and that everything is, in however dim and rudimentary way, conscious, everything becomes clearer. This is the question towards which The Book of Dust is working.”

Charlotte Wood’s new novel, The Weekend , is her best work yet. It is also one of the best novels of the year. At the same time – and I do not mean this disparagingly – it struck me as somehow old-fashioned, perhaps in part because of its departure...

Award-winning Australian poet John Kinsella’s latest novel draws on the “hollow Earth” tradition, which used imaginary subterranean worlds as a tool for satire and social critique. Bringing the genre into the 21st century, Kinsella’s Hollow Earth...

The short story has enjoyed a well-earned rise in prestige in recent years. The most interesting stories often beguile the reader by hovering over a single effect, bringing it to life through a freshness of prose style, economical patterning, and a...

While our government, under the guise of “compassionate conservatism”, announces plans to drug-test welfare recipients, journalist Antony Loewenstein brings us Pills, Powder, and Smoke , the result of more than four years’ investigation into the...

We spend most of our lives doing whatever we can to keep our bodies separate from our minds, but the world doesn’t have to work too hard to remind us they’re inextricable, the implication being that some day we will die. This tension is the rich...

There’s an invisible violence that occurs when the emotional grievances of white women are prioritised over the experiences of non-white women. When it’s exposed, the response is often one of hostility. In White Tears/Brown Scars , Ruby Hamad...

When I immigrated to Australia in 1986, this country was notably forward-looking compared with the United States and Britain, where Reagan’s and Thatcher’s neoliberal policies were busily dismantling civil society and social welfare. Here was...