Our favourite new reads include pacy crime fiction from one of Australia's top journalists, a timely reimagining of an American masterpiece and an examination of gender by a ground-breaking philosopher.
Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column: a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Book Show's Claire Nichols, The Bookshelf's Cassie McCullagh, ABC Arts' Nicola Heath and critic Declan Fry.
The writing style will be familiar to readers of contemporary crime fiction — present tense, short sentences — but this isn't your standard pulpy crime novel. Milligan writes with flair, and her characters will surprise you with their depth and gallows humour. Who's Afraid of Gender sees them taking names and, yes, maybe kicking a bit of ass. As Butler puts it: "A clear threat for some, but for others, a sign of hope, even a sight of gathering, 'gender' is in the process of getting queered, reworked and revised, twisted and replaced."
As Butler writes, "If these were timeless categories, they could not be redefined, which means that whatever the category of 'women' once meant is what it means forever. That would toss both feminism and history into the dustbin.
Danger is also in the deliciously nervous laughter Everett elicits: a wandering troupe of blackface minstrels see no issue with enlisting James to their lampoonery; a would-be lynch mob is thwarted by its own stupidity and blind prejudice. But when Jessica dumps Esther and their "cottage-core-lesbian-fantasy" she retreats, seeking solace in the world of true-crime podcasts — Bundy, Manson, the Gilgo Beach murders. She wants to find a way out, gorging on "the extra-terrestrial world of sociopathic behavior, convincing myself that Jessica was no different from them — I was after-all a woman she had abandoned in the mountains".
Twisty and acerbic, this is the sharp-tongued meditation on money, art, power and the joy of being totally destroyed by a good true-crime podcast that I didn't know I needed.on a bright spring morning in May 2021. The final death toll was more than 85, most of them schoolchildren. "Practising medicine in a rural district demonstrated brutally that the lives of women were nearly unbearable and that the lack of education and abject poverty were the direct result of the turmoil the country was in," she writes.Your weekly destination for in-depth literary interviews as well news and analysis about the publishing industry. A must-listen for lovers of fiction.
Samar offers a damning account of the political missteps that led to the Taliban regaining power and the catastrophic fall of Kabul in August 2021. She writes: "The Taliban played the international community like a fiddle." What anthropologist W.E.H Stanner called "the great Australian silence" is a tale everyone may choose, if they wish, to hear. Or not: Scott's writing reminds us that we have not always lived within the same silences in this country.
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