The opening scenes of Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird are emphatically bucolic. Three women bathe in a river, the soft fabric of their robes clinging to their skin in the water. But ...

Imagine this unlikely scenario: the President of the United States of America is a charlatan; he talks a lot, or rather blusters along, boosting himself as he goes; and eventually he declares war on ...

During protests in the US in the middle of 2020, a Predator drone circled in the sky above Minneapolis. Some 20,000ft below, ...

678pp. Miegunyah Press. A$120. Edited by Patrick McCaughey, with John Timlin Fred Williams is one of a handful of Australian twentieth-century artists who are broadly known within their own country ...

What a peculiar book this is. Peter York, best known for his cod-anthropological examin­ation of British society’s various snobby tribes, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), has turned his ...

The forty-two essays that Tom McAllister wrote for this book began as an attempt to unshackle himself from social media and its brain-rotting effects. He set strict parameters: one essay for every ...

The hegemony of the United States in the Americas – part of the “greatness” Donald Trump is so anxious to shore up or retrieve – has been a brief and surprising phenomenon. For observers who consider ...

Natalie Lawrence believes in monsters. In her latest book, Enchanted Creatures, she contends that “they are not imaginary: their forms are fanciful, but what they are is very real”. While she admits ...

In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, reviewed by Lucy Popescu (In Brief, April 18), a character points out that “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”. This is evidently ...

Amanda Knox’s first memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, was published in 2013, just as her retrial for the murder of twenty-one-year-old Meredith Kercher was taking place in Italy. Her second memoir, Free: ...