A column canvassing current literary news including a report on an international publishing deal for Torre DeRoche's self-published Swept: Love with a Chance of Drowning. Jason Steger also notes the publication, as an e-book, of Richard Flanagan's closing address to the 2011 Melbourne Writers' Festival. The address, also published in Quarterly Essay 44, is titled The Australian Disease: On the Decline of Love and the Rise of Non-Freedom.