Non-fiction

The Chinese Communist Party is arguably the single most powerful organisation in the world.

It was when I turned to The Bourgeois that I really got a sense of Moretti’s epistemological superiority over most of his humanities competitors… It is not that the scientific team-man has simply trumped or supplanted the delicately tuned aesthetician. It is that Moretti has become both simultaneously, a lonely centaur or Janus-faced creature, at once historically minded and future oriented, sentimental and technicist, elegiac and plain speaking.

It is Kennedy’s belief that lived experience is essential to the writing process and needs to be integrated into the way writing is taught. Inviting a horse to the writing workshop is not her only irreverent suggestion. She also proposes that the student group and their teacher might benefit from sharing a meal, attending a concert together, or taking a walk.

As the fifty-something David Shields remarks in How Literature Saved My Life, ‘everyone I know under thirty has remarkably little notion of privacy.’ We are living in an age of idiots, in the etymologically precise sense of the word.

Feigel has gathered together a half-dozen writers – Graham Greene, Henry Green (the pen-name of Henry Yorke), Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann, and the little-known Hilde Spiel – and traced their lives, loves and works through the first shattering attacks in 1940-41 to the lull, and then the resumption in 1944, as the pilotless V-1 and V-2 attacks began.

Wark’s two books work sequentially, although they also loop around the same figures and concepts. They could be treated as histories of the Situationist milieu and its aftermaths, but to do so would miss entirely what makes them such compelling and, at times, hilarious reading.

The publication of The Letters of William Gaddis is significant because it presents the first direct and unveiled access to this ‘reclusive’ author. For those of us who know and love Gaddis’s work, however, there is something discomfiting about such personal revelations.

In 1997, the Booker Prize shortlist included a work by an Australian woman for the first time. Literary Australia was chuffed, but also surprised. Who was this Madeleine St John, published by Fourth Estate?

In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon… forensically examines families in which children turn out to be not what their parents had fondly expected. The title is a twist on the proverb, ‘The apple never falls far from the tree’. His question is: But what happens when they do?

Somerton Man is one of Adelaide’s great cold cases. The place is built of such true crime stories. On the surface, these narratives tell us, Adelaide is a charmingly ordered, picture-book city. But step carelessly and you could fall through a hole into a parallel world of violence, murder and intrigue.