Inner Worlds Outer Spaces by Ceridwen Dovey

$35.00 AUD

Category: Essays

What does it feel like to be passionate about your daily work? How do people find their way into fascinating, unusually fulfilling careers, even against the odds? Space lawyers and bibliotherapists; euthanasia activists and women's rugby champions; shark experts and solar power visionaries; a master per fumer and a moon dust maven, among many others. What all of these people have in common is the courage to pursue their dreams and obsessions, no matter how niche or particular, and transform them into their life's work. In the process, they've enacted lasting change in the world around them. Delving into the working lives of others for publications as diverse as newyorker.com, The Monthly and WIRED, Ceridwen Dovey's inquisitive, thoughtful approach has allowed her to explore fields of knowledge and expertise that are often inaccessible to outsiders. The resulting profiles are a celebration of the extraordinary and meaningful work done by those on paths less travelled. ...Show more

China Dependence - Australia's New Vulnerability by Jonathan Pearlman

$23.00 AUD

Category: Essays

The latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs explores Australia's status as the most China-dependent country in the developed world, and the potential risks this poses to its future prosperity and security. China Dependence examines how Australia should respond to the emerging economic and diplomatic challenges as its trade - for the first time - is heavily reliant on a country that is not a close ally or partner. ...Show more

Quarterly Essay 77: Cry Me a River, The Tragedy of the Murray-Darling Basin by Margaret Simons by Margaret Simons

$23.00 AUD

Category: Essays

The Murray-Darling Basin is the food bowl of Australia, and it's in trouble. What does this mean for the future - for water and food, and for the people and towns that depend on it? In this Quarterly Essay, acclaimed journalist Margaret Simons takes a trip through the basin, all the way from Queensland to South Australia. She shows that its plight is environmental but also economic, and enmeshed in ideology and identity. Her essay is both a portrait of the Murray-Darling Basin and an explanation of its woes. It looks at rural Australia and the failure of political processes over the last few generations to meet the needs of communities forced to bear the heaviest burden of change. It considers corruption and resource politics, drought and climate change.   ...Show more

Beauty by Bri Lee

$20.00 AUD

Category: Essays

A powerful meditation on beauty and body image from the author of Eggshell Skull.  You were either fit and trim or you weren't working hard enough. Your body was how you conveyed wealth and status to your peers, it was a personality trait, a symbol of goodness and values: an ethical ideal. In recen t decades women have made momentous progress fighting the patriarchy, yet they are held to ever-stricter, more punishing physical standards. Self-worth still plummets and eating disorders are more deadly for how easily they are dismissed. In Beauty Bri Lee explores our obsession with thinness and asks how an intrinsically unattainable standard of physical 'perfection' has become so crucial to so many. What happens if you try to reach that impossible goal? Bri did try, and Beauty is what she learned from that battle: a gripping and intelligent rejection of an ideal that diminishes us all. ...Show more

The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapseto Nuclear Near Misses by Dan Carlin

$35.00 AUD

Category: Essays

From the creator of the wildly popular podcast comes Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: History at the Extremes. Dan Carlin has created a new way to think about history. His award-winning podcast is revered for its unique blend of high drama, enthralling narration, and Twilight Zone-style twists. A politica l commentator, Carlin approaches history like a magician, employing completely unorthodox and always entertaining ways of taking a second look at what we think we know about wars, empires, and leaders across centuries and millennia. In his long-awaited first book, Carlin tackles some of history's biggest what ifs with all his trademark charm and erudition, from whether historical heroes like Alexander the Great were in fact comparable to Hitler to whether our greatest social upheavals came in the wake of our most deadly epidemics. He puts us in the shoes of good people who were led to do very bad things, compares military might across the ages and makes us think again about how and why civilisations fall. In asking and answering these questions, Carlin gets to grips with the guts of history, and shows us how the forces of our past continue to shape our present and future. ...Show more

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

$23.00 AUD

Category: Essays

I sometimes think I was born reading ... I can't remember the time when I didn't have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. A celebration of the delights of rereading from the acclaimed author of The Odd Woman and the City In nine essays that meld criticism and memoir, Gornick retur ns to the books that have shaped her. She finds herself in contradictory figures in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras's The Lover. She uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen's prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, 'whose work has often made me love life more'. After adopting two cats, whose erratic behaviour she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing's Particularly Cats. From a young New York reporter, to a critic exploring gender and feminism, to a woman in the jubilant solitude of older age- the characters Gornick meets in literature speak to the person she is when reading, and in reopening her favourite texts she meets characters anew. Infused with her trademark verve and insight, this is a masterful appreciation of literature's ability to illuminate, from a peerless writer who 'still reads to feel the power of Life with a capital L'. ...Show more

Salt: Selected Essays and Stories by Bruce Pascoe

$35.00 AUD

Category: Essays

A collection of stories and essays by the award-winning author of Dark Emu, showcasing his shimmering genius across a lifetime of work. Bruce Pascoe has been described as a 'living national treasure' and his work as 'revelatory'. This volume of his best and most celebrated stories and essays, collected here for the first time, ranges across his long career, and explores his enduring fascination with Australia's landscape, culture, land management and history. Featuring new and previously unpublished fiction alongside his most revered and thought-provoking nonfiction - including extracts from his modern classic Dark Emu - this collection is perfect for Pascoe fans and new readers alike. It's time all Australians saw the range and depth of this most marvellous of local writers ...Show more

Yes to Life in Spite of Everything by Viktor E. Frankl

$25.00 AUD

Category: Essays

Extraordinary uncovered work by the 16 million copy bestselling author of Man's Search For Meaning Just months after his liberation from Auschwitz renowned psychiatrist Viktor Frankl delivered a series of talks revealing the foundations of his life-affirming philosophy for which he would become world f amous. Despite the unspeakable horrors in the camp, Frankl learnt from his fellow inmates that it is always possible to say 'yes to life'. This profound and timeless lesson is amongst many in this remarkable collection now publishing in English for the very first time. With a foreword by Daniel Goleman ...Show more

On Secrets (On Series) by Annika Smethurst

$17.00 AUD

Category: On Series | Series: On Ser.

Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts New Chapters by Rebecca Solnit

$28.00 AUD

Category: Essays

Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their ow n centrality. In Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit appraises what's emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are. ...Show more

The Hero: The Enduring Myth That Makes Us Human by Lee Child

$18.00 AUD

Category: Essays | Series: TLS Bks.

What makes a hero? Who better to answer that question than Lee Child... 'It's Lee Child. Why would you not read it?'- Karin Slaughter'. I don't know another author so skilled at making me turn the page' - The Times In his first work of nonfiction, the creator of the multimillion-selling Jack Reacher series explores the endurance of heroes from Achilles to Bond, showing us how this age-old myth is a fundamental part of what makes us human. He demonstrates how hero stories continue to shape our world - arguing that we need them now more than ever. From the Stone Age to the Greek Tragedies, from Shakespeare to Robin Hood, we have always had our heroes. The hero is at the centre of formative myths in every culture and persists to this day in world-conquering books, films and TV shows. But why do these characters continue to inspire us, and why are they so central to storytelling? Scalpel-sharp on the roots of storytelling and enlightening on the history and science of myth, The Hero is essential reading for anyone trying to write or understand fiction. Child teaches us how these stories still shape our minds and behaviour in an increasingly confusing modern world, and with his trademark concision and wit, demonstrates that however civilised we get, we'll always need heroes. ...Show more

Spinoza's Overcoat - Travels with Writers and Poets by Subhash Jaireth

$30.00 AUD

Category: Essays

'It starts to rain as I step out of my hotel ....' So begins Subhash Jaireth's striking collection of essays on the writers, and their writing, that have enriched his own life. The works of Franz Kafka, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Bulgakov, Paul Celan, Hiromi Ito, Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and othe rs ignite in him the urge to travel (both physically and in spirit), almost like a pilgrim, to the places where such writers were born or died or wrote. In each essay a new emotional plane is reached revealing enticing connections. As a novelist, poet, essayist and translator born into a multilingual environment, Jaireth truly understands the power of words across languages and their integral connections to life of the body and the spirit. Drawing on years of research, translation and travel Spinoza's Overcoat - and its illuminations of loss, mortality and the reverie of writing - will linger with readers. 'Eloquent and original, Jaireth's meditations on the lives-of-poets are full of astonishing details, tender connections and the magnificent melancholy of devotion to words. Encompassing matters of translation, love, mortality and homage, this is a rare model of what might be called "literary philosophy" and an utter joy and surprise for anyone interested in the reading and writing life ?' GAIL JONES, author of The Death of Noah Glass ...Show more