Project MUSE®: Antipodes - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Antipodes.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 32 (2018) through current issue
Latest Articles: AntipodesTWOProject MUSE®Antipodes2331-90890893-5580Latest articles in Antipodes. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978723
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Starting out this issue of Antipodes are the winners and honorable mention of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies–American Australia Association Creative Writers Prizes, beginning with Mununjali author Ellen van Neerven's poem "List for the Living," followed by Anne Casey's poem "X-ray," Gay Lynch's "Hebe's Lament," and the Honorable Mention poem "Downtime" by Gregory Dally.Our cover for this issue comes from the multitalented hand of John Kinsella, "Halfworld: '28' Parrot Lantern of Hope" (2025). In September 2022, I fortuitously visited Western Australia and met John in York when he was showing his Dante series. He used similar color schemes, even for Inferno, and it was a bit surprising how
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallFrom the Editor2026-01-06text/htmlen-USFrom the Editor2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®57332026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06About the Cover
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978724
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The title of this image is "Halfworld: '28' Parrot Lantern of Hope" (2025) and it's part of a series of a dozen A3-sized drawings based on my Halfworld writings (the first novel of this series has been printed in full in Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, #55–56, Volume 22, Numbers 1 + 2, 2023, ed. Van Ikin, with other work appearing in a range of journals and anthologies). It is done in vegan colored pencil on vegan medium grain cartridge paper of 220gsm.Two obsessions come into play here. First, a lifelong fascination with "28" parrots. They are a subspecies of Australian ringneck parrots, closely related to Port Lincoln parrots which are actually the more common species around here; further
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallAbout the Cover2026-01-06text/htmlen-USAbout the Cover2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®38612026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06List for the Living
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978725
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Indigenous Writer PrizeEllen van Neervan (Mununjali)List for the LivingPoetry PrizeAnne M. CaseyX-rayCreative Prose PrizeGay LynchHebe's LamentPoetry Honorable MentionGregory DallyDowntimeCasuarina Beach, Darwin, NT B. Machosky
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallList for the Living2026-01-06text/htmlen-USList for the Living2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®41172026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06X-ray
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978726
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I hold it like a junk shop knickknack. A notched samurai sword perhaps: ancient artefact of conflicts no-one is alive to recall. Equal parts compulsion and revulsion. Curious impulse curbed by my illiteracy. How to read these light and dark shapes? How to make sense of their story? No matter. Nothing to see here: a cluster of shrivelled nooks where plump sacs should be. An under-developed left lung, flattened recesses, festerings amidst debris from a wake of outbreaths. There is a perfunctory discussion about keeping an eye out for a lingering cough. Finish the course. Come back with any issues. And I am dismissed. I juggle items, implications. The unlikely collectible stowed in its oversized envelope, clamped
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallX-ray2026-01-06text/htmlen-USX-ray2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®53152026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Hebe's Lament
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978727
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Hebe drags on blue latex gloves and drops from the embankment onto the track. She lands awkwardly, knees buckling. To reach him, she needs to crawl over gravel beneath the train, which may damage her gloves. Thwack—she strips them off again and curses.The hijab-wearing police officer who handed them over steps away and shouts into her phone: 'stop all oncoming trains.'After night shift, Hebe customarily speeds past shadowy trees, keys jammed in her fist, to locate her parked car on darkened streets. No woman she knows lives free from fear of gender-based violence. But this morning in bright daylight, Hebe's partner ambles behind her. Coupledom chafes her, and she paces further ahead to join a stream of pedestrians.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallHebe's Lament2026-01-06text/htmlen-USHebe's Lament2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®227832026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06"First you go and form a Co": Boundary Disputes in Patricia Grace's "Ngati Kangaru"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978729
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Australia is often regarded as a land of promise and opportunity by people from Aotearoa New Zealand; however, this turns out to be a mirage for many Māori. Patricia Grace's satirical short story "Ngati Kangaru," from her collection The Sky People (1994), features a Māori whānau (family) that playfully deploys the techniques of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's New Zealand Company to reclaim land for discontented members of the Australian Māori diaspora. The title "Ngati Kangaru"—"ngati," meaning "tribe" or "clan," and "Kangaru," a transliteration of "kangaroo"—collectively refers to members of the Māori living in Sydney (Poi Hakena) who express a desire to return home to Aotearoa. Grace avoids the name "Australia" in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmall"First you go and form a Co": Boundary Disputes in Patricia Grace's "Ngati Kangaru"2026-01-06text/htmlen-US"First you go and form a Co": Boundary Disputes in Patricia Grace's "Ngati Kangaru"2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®644472026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Adapting Badiou
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978731
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Such a practice—of unprecedented health—had its own binary to tread: of being of feeling, of performance. Yet being sane it could rise (spare me) between anger and error (which of course played other parts, in other shows). Reading William Baylebridge for the abstracted gap between the archaic and modern, the paper was part of it. Watching doves were refreshed: the poetic mouse darted and retreated—Like a horizontal yoyo. By altering my Saturday, I altered my Sunday. I tried, as best as able, to avoid being sucked into the eternal, or the vitalist. I didn't defend Wagner against Tolstoy, that being a complicated pot to boil one's hands in. To adapt Alain Badiou: 'Origins, operations, style and philosophy
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallAdapting Badiou2026-01-06text/htmlen-USAdapting Badiou2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®36362026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06"Do You Want to Get Rich or Do You Want to Stay Poor?": Peter Carey's "Exotic Pleasures," the Romance of Space, and The War of the Worlds
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978734
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When Peter Carey's short stories first began to be published in Australia, readers, writers, and critics recognized many of them as groundbreaking, the work of an important new voice. At that time, however, few Australian literary critics and reviewers possessed the critical vocabulary and theory in the then-new area of academic science fiction criticism to understand aspects of the most innovative work that Carey's science fiction stories were undertaking. Critically, while insights into how postcolonial writers used the science fiction genre to critique colonialism and imperialism may be broadly prevalent now, it is only relatively recently that critics such as Judith Leggatt have described the ways in which
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmall"Do You Want to Get Rich or Do You Want to Stay Poor?": Peter Carey's "Exotic Pleasures," the Romance of Space, and The War of the Worlds2026-01-06text/htmlen-US"Do You Want to Get Rich or Do You Want to Stay Poor?": Peter Carey's "Exotic Pleasures," the Romance of Space, and The War of the Worlds2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®819762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Sun and Stars
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978736
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If you come to peace with the star you have come to peace with yourself. With
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallSun and Stars2026-01-06text/htmlen-USSun and Stars2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®66822026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06"The last time I came here": Insecure Renting and Unstable Temporality in Contemporary Australian Lyric Poetry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978739
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In this article, I examine lyric poems from three recent collections by Australian poets: After the Demolition (2019) by the Queensland poet Zenobia Frost, Rose Interior (2022) by the West Australian poet Tracy Ryan, and Leave Me Alone (2022) by the Victorian poet Harry Reid, who each use the lyric to interrogate the complex conditions associated with renting in contemporary Australia, where increasingly large portions of the country are renting for longer. Their poems examine how rental insecurity impacts elderly renters, critique the erasure of sharehouse communities, and contend with the repetitious and uncontrollable anxieties of a housing market in which renters have very few rights. In grappling with these
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmall"The last time I came here": Insecure Renting and Unstable Temporality in Contemporary Australian Lyric Poetry2026-01-06text/htmlen-US"The last time I came here": Insecure Renting and Unstable Temporality in Contemporary Australian Lyric Poetry2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®723202026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Aboriginal Australian Writing and Student Resistance to Learning About Race: A "Take It Slant" Approach
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978744
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Teaching about race and racism in the American college classroom today is difficult and even dangerous. Tertiary instructors who talk about race in their classrooms face resistance from students that ranges from indifference to outright hostility—in some cases, leading to fear, public shaming, or even firing.1 However, as proponents of the humanities, professors of literature must not simply submit to such pressures. Finding workarounds to address race in our classrooms need not be a weak alternative. Teaching Aboriginal Australian writing and history in the American classroom is a creative way to address the extremely fraught political issues around race because students' preconceptions, even prejudice and bias
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallAboriginal Australian Writing and Student Resistance to Learning About Race: A "Take It Slant" Approach2026-01-06text/htmlen-USAboriginal Australian Writing and Student Resistance to Learning About Race: A "Take It Slant" Approach2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®635282026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06At First, She Fled
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978745
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The first time Theo saw Helen, she fled. But that's not where the story starts, Theo says.It began about a year earlier, when he met her elder sister Rene.She was visiting his parents' shop in Katoomba with his Aunty Kalimeras. Rene and Theo started talking, and before long she was telling him about a sister back in Guyra who would suit him."She's good looking, she's blond, she's got this nice personality, and she's not like me," Rene said.Theo chuckles. "She's not like me. I love that."Twelve months later, in 1947, he had the opportunity to accompany his uncle on a trip."We were going to Grafton. And on the Sunday morning, I knew we were going to go through Guyra," Theo says.He also knew they would stop by Rene's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallAt First, She Fled2026-01-06text/htmlen-USAt First, She Fled2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®120542026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06All Boys' Annual
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978746
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Father leaves the barn, sails his best legs into the mist. Soon he is a hero swallowed whole by distance. His tight whistle shrills and the dog gives her old collar another good shake. The way she trots along in his wake.We wrestle into waxy parcels of cloth, rumble into gumboots, and float our goodbyes back to Mother, who waits at the cottage, waving hooray from the back door to all her very best boys."Bring us back a wriggly one!" She hollers, the roaster of pigs."Get yourselves the measure of it," Father says, bobbing over the sallow deep field. Behind him, we are echoes; his footprints big on us, even in our boots.We bounce over the soil, feeling it give, while the dog performs an ancient dance, huffing and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallAll Boys' Annual2026-01-06text/htmlen-USAll Boys' Annual2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®36552026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Plain Street
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978747
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Plain Street is quiet. Cordoned off in the early hours of the morning, police officers order the residents to stay indoors. A convoy of HX3 army trucks follow, and soldiers deliver boxes of provisions. For now, no one is at liberty to say why or for how long the lockdown will last.The residents are gripped with an indefinable emotion, teetering on the edge of fear, but, on the back of the pandemic, they do as they are told.There are five houses in the street, which is little more than a gravel road tapering off into a bracken-lined track at the base of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. The people of Plain Street walk as often as they can along the creamy Permian mudstone track, bryozoan, and brachiopod fossils underfoot
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallPlain Street2026-01-06text/htmlen-USPlain Street2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®259942026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Rock Wallaby: Lightly … quietly
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978748
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He says: "We must walk lightly. We must always walk lightly."He is told, again and again, "walk lightly on this Country," and repeats the mantra, quietly.His words loop in your mind, and you try. You are in a hurry for your home. For your bed. For sleep. For warmth. But you still try to step lightly. The suitcase makes a quiet touch more difficult, but you imagine a pocket of air under each step; a silencing of weight.You sit gently on the station bench and the air seems different with this effort. Your breath. You slow and sit and see, beyond where you usually can. Before and beyond, like he says.You wait.It arrives and you try not to lug your suitcase when the doors open, and don't barge the internal door with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallRock Wallaby: Lightly … quietly2026-01-06text/htmlen-USRock Wallaby: Lightly … quietly2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®85122026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Liebesträume
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978749
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It's a cadaverous, rotten heat that's beating down on the terrace, but the ocean's so close it's like our margaritas are seasoned with sea spray. (Could this be the origin of the famous salted rim?) A pack of backpackers-gone-wild leave their novelty saltshakers behind the bar, opting instead to lick stray ocean directly from each other's glistening skin before upending double Don Julios and sinking perfect white teeth into fresh cut limes.A fleshy, rummy sweetness, an obscene surplus of tropical decay, mingles with the briny air. Two parts sweet to one part salty, or a moment in a muddle of time. Spindrift lifts from wave after towering wave and glides past in cool sheets. A humming evaporator unit drops its veil
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallLiebesträume2026-01-06text/htmlen-USLiebesträume2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®234162026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Black Snake Father
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978750
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There was ginger hair dirt in the tiny scars on his fingers; that knew a dog chain, knew how to jiggle the snip of a gate and how to cut meat holding a pocket-knife like a pencil. In the tractor he was hypnotised by straight dawn plough shadows until a black snake stole the vision and there he was, walking through plough mounds following the black liquid ribbon, throwing that length of chain he kept under the tractor seat after the careful snake, keeping it on the move until it refused and turned on him. Breathing heavily, he crowned the reptile with the chain, smashing it to skin and teeth and juices. The red of his face was the same colour as the black-snake belly. Traipsing back to the tractor with chest pains
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallBlack Snake Father2026-01-06text/htmlen-USBlack Snake Father2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®52542026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06The Tide
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978751
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Now that Pip was the highest point in the dinghy, she wanted to lie down alongside her dead father. She wanted to curl up and hide. Instead she squatted while steering, her head lower than the bow, but only too aware that to find the way home she had to check their direction. Pip waited until the next lightning bolt had struck before bobbing her head up to search for land. There was only sea, sky, and storm. Everything was grey and raucous. The land was hiding behind the horizon.The bottom of the boat was crowded now with Pip, the turtle, the loose tackle, and the dead emperors: her father Simmo and the fish. If she were to toss the red emperor overboard, she would waste the delicious white fillets. Instead, she
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallThe Tide2026-01-06text/htmlen-USThe Tide2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®289482026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Ordinary Gods and Monsters by Chris Womersley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978753
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Published by Picador Books in 2023, Ordinary Gods and Monsters is the award-winning Australian author Chris Womersley's sixth novel. Detailing the eventful summer of teen friends, neighbors, and the new high-school graduates Nick Wheatley and Marion Perry, the book begins with the untimely death of Marion's father in a hit-and-run accident. The official investigation's failure to turn up any suspects prompts Nick to contact the late Mr. Perry during a séance at his drug dealer's house. Following the clues revealed via Ouija board, Nick and Marion find themselves at the center of a complex plot—one that shines a new light on the suburban streets of their hometown.Womersley introduces a lively cast of characters
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallOrdinary Gods and Monsters by Chris Womersley (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USOrdinary Gods and Monsters by Chris Womersley (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®74922026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Losing Face by George Haddad (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978754
<p></p>
The author George Haddad, within the first few pages of introducing his readers to nineteen-year-old Joey Harb, skillfully crafts a main character who is deeply unsympathetic. The stoned Joey throws the garbage from his lunch into the bed of a truck because he is too lazy either to walk to a trash can or carry it home. He has chucked a sickie from work just because he does not feel like going. He not only has forgotten to buy his little brother a birthday gift but has also not remembered that his brother's birthday party is that night. He tries to ignore his mother's calls to take some responsibility by helping her at the shops, and even when he does eventually accompany her, he finds a box of dishwashing detergent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallLosing Face by George Haddad (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USLosing Face by George Haddad (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®69802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978755
<p></p>
In July 1983, in response to the discrimination and persecution of the minority Tamil ethnic group by the Sri Lankan government, members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ambushed a Sri Lankan army patrol, killing fifteen. The response was a full-scale genocidal attack that launched a civil war lasting more than twenty-five years; the UN estimates that there were between eighty and one hundred thousand casualties. The Sri Lankan war casts a long shadow over Shankari Chandran's timely and compelling novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, in spite of its sunny name and contemporary setting in a neighborhood in west Sydney.The book opens not in Sri Lanka but on the manicured grounds of Cinnamon Gardens, which is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallChai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USChai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®72762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Memory and Identity in Contemporary Chinese-Australian Novels by Beibei Chen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978756
<p></p>
In diasporic literature, themes of memory and identity often serve as the backbone, intricately weaving the immigrant experience into narratives of self-discovery, belonging, and cultural resonance. Beibei Chen's Memory and Identity in Contemporary Chinese-Australian Novels offers a profound analysis of these themes, unraveling how memory operates not only as a deeply personal archive but also as a powerful cultural force. This book illuminates the ongoing quest for diasporic identity within Chinese Australian literature, where memory assumes a dual role: It preserves the roots of cultural heritage while also influencing how individuals reconstruct their identities in new environments.Chen draws on a range of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallMemory and Identity in Contemporary Chinese-Australian Novels by Beibei Chen (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USMemory and Identity in Contemporary Chinese-Australian Novels by Beibei Chen (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®86312026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06My Tongue Is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood by Ann-Marie Priest (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978757
<p></p>
Ann-Marie Priest's biography of the Australian poet, librettist, and essayist Gwen Harwood (1920–1995) effervesces with the energy, wit, and talent, and also the contradictions and complexity, of its mercurial, volatile, polyphonic subject.The biographer's interest in Harwood was initially piqued by her chance encounter, in a Melbourne secondhand bookstore, with a volume of the poet's 1943 (wartime) letters from Brisbane, Queensland, titled Blessed City (her affectionate name for Brisbane, her hometown), to Lieutenant Tony Riddell, then on active service in the Royal Australian Navy, who was to become a lifelong friend and correspondent. Reading these engaging early letters ignited a lasting passion in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallMy Tongue Is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood by Ann-Marie Priest (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USMy Tongue Is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood by Ann-Marie Priest (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®110532026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Limberlost by Robbie Arnott (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978758
<p></p>
The Australian author Robbie Arnott's award-winning third novel, Limberlost, offers an introspective journey into the precarious nature of one's connections to land, family, and history through the story of Ned West. As a young man, Ned West resides on his family's apple orchard, Limberlost, near a large river in northern Tasmania. He lives there with his sister, Maggie, and their father, who manages the property, while his two older brothers are away fighting in the Second World War. This Bildungsroman-esque novel alternates between Ned's adolescent journey during his summer school holidays—where he traps rabbits to sell their pelts and save money for a boat—and the unfolding story of his middle-aged years.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallLimberlost by Robbie Arnott (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USLimberlost by Robbie Arnott (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®87792026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06The Paper Nautilus by Michael Jackson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978759
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The Paper Nautilus, a fiction/nonfiction trilogy by the New Zealand writer and ethnographer Michael Jackson, begins with a careful explanation of its own central themes and images. "My theme," Jackson writes, "is loss: the forms it takes and how we go on living in the face of it" (12). The book's central image, he tells us, is that of a paper nautilus, a pelagic octopus that carries its eggs in a thin shell that shatters when the eggs hatch, a symbol of "the mysterious ways in which new life and new beginnings are born of brokenness" (11).At first, I wondered why Jackson felt the need to tell his readers the theme of his book in advance. Isn't that something readers generally work out for themselves? After I had
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallThe Paper Nautilus by Michael Jackson (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USThe Paper Nautilus by Michael Jackson (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®71552026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06The Conversion by Amanda Lohrey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978760
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The Conversion is a novel about a woman, Zoe, going through a period of upheaval. She is at the end of her career, she has lost her life savings in a financial crash, and she finds herself moving out of the city and into an abandoned church, a plan initially concocted by her husband but one that Zoe must undertake alone.For the amount of turmoil going on in Zoe's life, the main conflict that reaches the page is Zoe's difficulty converting the church into a place to live. The first section of the novel, "Windows," orbits around Zoe's inability to rid herself of the large stained-glass windows that depict various biblical violences, not something altogether pleasant to wake up to each morning. However, simmering just
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallThe Conversion by Amanda Lohrey (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USThe Conversion by Amanda Lohrey (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®73002026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Wildflowers by Peggy Frew (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978761
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What struck me the most about Wildflowers by Peggy Frew were the layers of meaning and the twists and turns of the plot. I thought I knew where things were heading, and suddenly I did not. I thought I knew who or what the novel was about, and suddenly I did not. My other overall impression was that many times I just felt "icky" reading the story—but icky in a meaningful and productive way. The characters and their actions got under my skin and made me profoundly uncomfortable, all in service of thinking more deeply about the choices we make in families and in our individual lives.Like her earlier novel, Hope Farm, Frew invites readers into the internal world of a small group of characters and peels back the layers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallWildflowers by Peggy Frew (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USWildflowers by Peggy Frew (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®67802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Salonika Burning by Gail Jones (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978762
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In Gail Jones's Salonika Burning, one man and three women volunteer in World War Ⅰ relief efforts. Exploring themes of death and annihilation, Jones's narrative penetrates our very hearts and souls, releasing primal human desire. In her brilliant creative synthesis, the burning of Salonika stimulates the burning passions in our own lives, offering us a clear vision of both apocalypse and restoration.Jones develops four characters from the historical wartime experiences of the Australians Miles Franklin, Olive King, Grace Palithorpe, and Stanley Spencer. On August 18, 1917, the Great Fire of Salonika (now Thessaloniki) ignited, destroying much of this Greek Macedonian city. Some of the soldiers witnessed "the view
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallSalonika Burning by Gail Jones (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USSalonika Burning by Gail Jones (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®78842026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian Women's War Fiction by Donna Coates (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978763
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Those who wrote about Australian literature way back in the twentieth century were very used to colleagues in North America expressing skepticism about their area of study. Everybody from that era has their own story. Mine was that a colleague, looking at my CV, expressed concern that I was not writing about more major authors, expecting to find my vita dominated by such names as Shakespeare and Wordsworth and pointing, forlornly, to a name of somebody of whom they had not heard, wondered why I was wasting my time like that. That writer, Gerald Murnane, has since been profiled in The New York Times and The New Yorker and frequently discussed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Part of the burden of working in an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/765/image/coversmallShooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian Women's War Fiction by Donna Coates (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USShooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian Women's War Fiction by Donna Coates (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®165152026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06