While they may be outnumbered and outweighed by insects, the terrestrial world is really the kingdom of the vertebrates. Mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians dominate most ecosystems. Yet, as Drew Harvell points out in her fascinating new book, the seeming diversity of the terrestrial vertebrates is deceptive. In fact all are contained within just one
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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist and critic James Bradley whose new book is Deep Water: The World in the Ocean. He tells me how we need to rethink our relationship with the sea and the life it contains, why fish are much more intelligent than we are used to imagining,
Sharks were never far from our minds as we grew up on the beach in Adelaide. Although attacks were rare, they were real. My grandfather was witness to the fatal mauling of a swimming instructor in the 1930s, and later a friend from university was killed while scuba diving off Port Noarlunga. Yet for the
Late last year in Australia’s The Monthly, Tim Winton wrote an essay on the urgent need for writers to look the climate crisis in the eye. Quoting Amitav Ghosh’s observation about the ‘patterns of evasion’ that continue to conceal the scale of the catastrophe, he argued that writers must overcome the habits of mind that
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 many writers spoke of feeling immobilised. The scale of the attacks and the world’s shared experience of the media event seemed to demand a response; but simultaneously writers such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Jay McInerney described a sense that the tools at their disposal were inadequate —
Almost 120 years ago, the Australian writer Henry Lawson offered some counsel to those who came after him, writing that his advice to any young Australian writer whose talents have been recognised would be to go steerage, stow away, swim and seek London, Yankeeland or Timbucktoo rather than stay in Australia till his genius turn
The Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s first novel, Narcopolis, charted a two-decade-long descent into the underworlds of Mumbai and addiction. One part de Quincey, one part Burroughs, it was distinguished not just by the sustained beauty and brilliance of its prose but by what must surely rank as a strong contender for the funniest scene in
In recent years the question of why the literary mainstream continues to marginalize and ignore writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy has become a live issue, perhaps most eloquently demonstrated by the furious reaction to the BBC’s shabby and offhand treatment of the genres in its World Book Night program, The Books We Really Read.