culture

“Language is important,” Sarah Maddison tells us at the start of The Colonial Fantasy , a necessary and purposefully confronting book. She sets out the vocabulary on which she believes any discussion of black–white relations in this country must be...

A chat among the books in a Brisbane bookshop institution.

The London-based literary agent Ed Victor once said to the writer Susan Johnson that he’d never come across a people more insecure about their relationship with their homeland than Australians – except, of course, the Russians. So perhaps it makes...

The 20 short stories in this collection by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin ooze with menace, seethe with anxiety and bristle with humour. The children of a mining town in “Underground” excavate a mysterious mound of dirt and then themselves...

This memoir tells of the author’s journey from polio-stricken child in postwar New York’s Little Italy to owner of Las Vegas’s hottest club in the late 1980s, where success was ensured by connections to Hollywood, politics, the mob, and “just plain...

In his intricate debut novel, Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg entwines the lives of an 18th-century transgender thief and the academic who becomes obsessed with his story. In doing so, Rosenberg aims to counteract the historical erasure – and the continuing persecution – of trans people. “There are many things missing from archives but sometimes even what is there can obscure more than it reveals.”

Make Me a City is a biography of Chicago in its first, dynamic century, and a wondrous, bold and playful first novel. Seductively fascinating characters, real and imagined, populate this fiction with their interweaving and intergenerational stories...

He lives and yet does not live; he’s flesh and yet not. He’s John Simpson, ill-fated stretcher-bearer of Gallipoli turned national myth, and in this short novel by Wayne Macauley, he’s dredged up from the mists of time along with Murphy the donkey,...

Imminence is the title of a newly translated novel from the Argentinian writer Mariana Dimópulos. It is also a word that can allude to, among other things, impending danger or evil. In this tense and deeply unsettling novel, the impending event is...