culture

Geordie Williamson The man who wants to pay Aaron, an 18-year-old heroin addict, for sex, is known simply as “The Man”. He is closer to 70 than 60, has black hair, tailored suits and an expensive car. “Everything about him says money, real money and opportunity” – or...

Monique Grbec “ If you want to know where to find your contribution to the world, look at your wounds. When you learn how to heal them, teach others .” – Emily Maroutian Stepping into the betrayal and bitterness of his history, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Right Story,...

Felicity Plunkett Lucy Treloar’s third novel begins with two small girls playing together in a fenced kindergarten. They crush flowers into perfume and promise always to love each other. A man appears at the fence and, when he leaves, he takes one of the girls. The “...

Luke Horton Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-shortlisted Prophet Song is a work of speculative fiction that poses the following question: what if the things we see on television happening in far-off places occurred in a country in the West? Or, more specifically: what...

James Bradley Max Easton’s 2021 novel, The Magpie Wing , was a striking debut. Tracing the lives of its characters across almost two decades, it brought a powerful class consciousness to its depiction of the social and physical landscape of Sydney’s west, while...

Celeste Liddle There’s a storyline running through Tony Birch’s Women & Children that I found not only relatable but had to an extent lived myself. Our loveable and scallywag young hero, Joe Cluny, becomes fascinated by a moneybox in his classroom – a Black...

Michael Williams There’s a trick Christos Tsiolkas does in his eighth novel, The In-Between . At several points in the action, as the central drama plays out in the foreground, the focus drifts away. Tsiolkas brings our attention instead to a passing youth on the...

Nathan Smith This year, Microsoft laid off its entire ethics team as it began adding ChatGPT to all its products, including Bing search. ChatGPT, for those unfamiliar, is a smart language software that can answer questions, write customised content and even hold...

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen “Great writing is about the outer things that point to the inner,” a character says in Julie Koh’s “On the Road”. That captures the spirit of Kill Your Darlings’ fifth annual New Australian Fiction anthology, which collects unusual stories that...