Cirrus@Austlit

'... The core team of Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott is back for another instalment of the long-running institution that is The Wharf Revue. In 2016's offering, Back to Bite You, there will be plenty of well-known figures from the political and public spheres appearing on stage in caricatured form to cop a serve, many of them familiar from previous years. ...'

'When Garrett Cotter was born in 1802 in County Cork, Ireland, the only settled part of the Australian continent was the small town huddled around Sydney Cove. This illiterate ploughman was transported to Australia in 1822. When he died in 1886 the Commonwealth of Australia was only 15 years away and eventually a National Capital would grow up near where he had lived, with a river named after him. ...'

'As we farewell the great cultural disrupter, Richard Neville, who died aged 74 this week, I remember warmly the time he could have cost me my job. In 1987 I was the young editor of Good Weekend magazine and commissioned staff writer Ginny Dougary to interview Neville and his old friend Richard Walsh over dinner (so we could mimic the title of the brilliant 1981 film, My Dinner with Andre). ...'

'Canberra is a city of secrets. And when Steve Lewis and Chris Uhlmann first began writing their series of books back in 2011 they had a plan to reveal a few of them. ...'

'Sarah Armstrong has been a journalist and producer for ABC radio and Foreign Correspondent on ABC TV. Her first novel, Salt Rain, was shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin Award. Her third novel, Promise (Macmillan), is about a woman who runs away with her neighbour's son after she suspects he is being abused. She lives in northern NSW with her husband, the writer Alan Close. ...'

'Every so often as a palliative care nurse, Steven Amsterdam is asked if there might be a less painful, more comfortable way out for a terminally ill patient. ...'

'It's difficult to believe it has been 10 years since Tara June Winch's astonishing debut Swallow the Air. Winch's startling voice and ability to punctuate her world with arresting images resulted in a deluge of accolades. Notably, she received the Rolex Protege and Artist Mentorship, pairing her with Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate in literature. Since then, Winch has been at work on a novel, with her next instalment eagerly anticipated. But first she has delivered this short story collection. ...'

'"Each time I enter my classroom, and the men assemble before me, I get an unmistakable feeling: that I belong here. If I were religious, maybe I would say that I had found my calling." During the period of increased arrivals that occurred under the Rudd-Gillard government, Adele Dumont took a job teaching English to asylum seekers being held in detention on Christmas Island and later at the Curtin detention centre in the West Australian desert. ...'

'The Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee's new novel begins with an epigraph in Spanish from Don Quixote: "Some say that second parts are never any good." This can be seen either as a challenge or as an insurance policy, perhaps both. The Schooldays of Jesus is a sequel to (or more accurately a continuation of) Coetzee's 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus. In this "second part" Coetzee ensures that the main preoccupations of his earlier work are alluded to, though often in so oblique a manner that readers unfamiliar with it might well find themselves puzzled and perplexed. ...'

'In his debut novel, The Windy Season, Australian writer Sam Carmody zeroes in on the unwashed and ominous underbelly of a seaside town. ...'