The Monthly

Culture issue out Monday (online now for subscribers), featuring The Monthly Awards, Gabriella Coslovich on the arts funding crisis, Kerry O’Brien on democracy’s decline, fiction from Shaun Micallef, plus Sean Kelly, Beejay Silcox, James Ley and more. www.themonthly.com.au/magazine/oct...

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What is this book? An elegy, an incantation, a hauntology, a history, a howl, a polemic, a dark comedy, a katabasis. The punchline to a 200-year-old bad joke. mnth.ly/mzKaadi

What happens when the child without a mother becomes a mother? What happens to the child of a mother who was not much mothered herself? mnth.ly/ZxJjFCp

A revelation from the author’s mother when she was six triggered a response that exposes the forever paired lives of parent and child mnth.ly/ER5I87d

While our bookshelves heave with military mythology, where are the Australian novels examining our participation in modern conflicts, including our longest war? mnth.ly/sgM5wcQ

A matter of weeks into rehearsals, a mob descends upon the actors. James describes the assault in terrifying detail, capturing its chaos and sadism in a breathless series of vignettes from the perspective of the assailants. mnth.ly/DeuxemD

While our bookshelves heave with military mythology, where are the Australian novels examining our participation in modern conflicts, including our longest war? mnth.ly/E4kS3aL

“Attention has been a commodity for as long as we’ve had politics,” writes Karen Middleton. “Digital technology monetised it and social media turbocharged it.” mnth.ly/TCYV8tc

Less than two weeks ago, a federal MP was reflecting privately on the febrile political atmosphere and made a chilling prediction. “Somebody’s going to get very badly hurt. Or worse.” mnth.ly/YyjQi6P

Helen Haines? In the practice of politics, she’s perhaps the nation’s best example of toughness with grace. A passionate and forthright local representative but a non-provocateur. Of all people. Helen Haines. mnth.ly/3Fmwlis

The fact that it was Helen Haines and not somebody with a more combustible political style is forcing the kind of soul-searching about the nature of public discourse that might occur less evenly if someone more pugnacious had been affected. mnth.ly/0WtV1OW

The shocking attack on Helen Haines adds weight to warnings that our political discourse is being supercharged by online hate, writes Karen Middleton. mnth.ly/JiAdqPe

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The fact that K-pop has taken over the world is not an accident: it is essentially a South Korean government program. Think the CIA’s role in founding ‘The Paris Review’, but with transparency and boy bands. mnth.ly/HEz9syV

Long used as an allegory for the silencing of marginalised voices, community-based hysteria, and the systemic disempowerment of women and both domestic and natural crafts, the witch trials have felt particularly resonant in pop culture in recent years. mnth.ly/sTPQ6zS

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A revelation from the author’s mother when she was six triggered a response that exposes the forever paired lives of parent and child mnth.ly/qEDGWGV

Their prank phone call to the DV Hotline was the last straw. The sponsors left in droves and sank their money in a bunch of influencers. Talk about hitching your wagon to a black hole. mnth.ly/57W60DW

The truth behind The Resilience Project and its founder, Hugh van Cuylenburg, who sells schools a wellbeing program with a surprising lack of empathy and evidence base. Read now: mnth.ly/LQnrXud

The truth behind The Resilience Project and its founder, Hugh van Cuylenburg, who sells schools a wellbeing program with a surprising lack of empathy and evidence base.

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Her father had a fantasy that, under the fabled Australian sun, they could emulate ‘The Good Life’, a shrewd 1970s British sitcom starring Felicity Kendal and Richard Briers, who are attempting to become self-sufficient dropouts in middle-class England. mnth.ly/gkrx1V5

The problem is that the answers offered by figures of the far right are never really answers. In place of a genuine attempt to reckon with fundamental questions, they give us only glib simplicity. mnth.ly/17Lvsob

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Judy Davis, hitherto the definitive Sybylla in Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 ‘My Brilliant Career’, last year inhabited Helen Garner for ‘The Spare Room’ at Belvoir; now there is to be an opera in Melbourne, directed by the redoubtable Sarah Goodes. mnth.ly/Iq89bPf

Surely this is what fiction is for: to invent a language for what we can’t otherwise say. To trace our ugly questions back to the hunger that feeds them. And yet you’ll be hard-pressed to find an Australian novel about our two decades in Afghanistan. mnth.ly/FxPblYw

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I’d finished chopping up my desk for firewood when she appeared at the door. Backlit and bathed in smoke from the cigarette between her fingers. “Mr M’Noir?” she oozed. mnth.ly/czOejl6