Cirrus@Austlit

The Australian Literary Review commissioned the Australian Public Intellectual Network (API) to conduct a survey to discover the nation's 'top thinkers'. The API's Richard Nile comments on the make-up of the resulting list and the role of intellectuals in Australian public life. He concludes: 'We would do well as a democracy to give [intellectuals] space to think.'

Williamson discusses the idea that, following the era of critical theory, beauty is now back on the academy's agenda. 'The concept has returned to the fore in university syllabuses, and the philosophy and litcrit shelves of bookshops have filled with titles devoted to both academic and laymen's discussion of the place of beauty in the creation and study of literature, and artworks in general.'

Jodie Minus looks at the trajectory of Melina Marchetta's career from 'multicultural' to mainstream writer. Minus expresses the hope that Randa Abdel-Fattah will travel a similar path. 'We should look forward to the day', says Minus, 'when Abdel-Fattah no longer writes only about the problems facing Muslims, but about issues faced by all sorts of Australians'.

In defending the role of literary fiction in early twenty-first century culture, James Bradley argues that 'in a society that values only questions with pre-ordained answers, literary fiction is, gloriously and deliberately, a question that refuses to answer itself.' Bradley's belief is that if we dismiss literary fiction 'we will have lost one of the few places we have left where we may glimpse something of the strangeness and irreducibility of our inner lives, and where we may, if only momentarily, see past the vision of our lives and their meaning our society offers us, and be free'.

Matthew Kelly argues the opposite case in 'The Fuss Over Super-Fine Fiction : Books Need Buyers'.

Matthew Kelly puts the opposing case to that presented in James Bradley's 'The Fuss Over Super-Fine Fiction : Invaluable Reading'. Kelly, a publisher, states that: 'There are two kinds of writing: good and bad. And we should celebrate fine fiction of the first category and encourage audiences for it. But let us not waste time and energy on irrelevant assertions that publishers have a moral obligation to publish books, regardless of whether anybody wants to read them'.