‘When a group of essays get together in a room they start talking to each other, often in surprising ways ... The existence of these voices – stylish, vital frequently wise – is a source of hope.’ —Anna Goldsworthy The Best Australian Essays showcases the nation’s most eloquent, insightful and urgent non-fiction writing. In her debut as editor of the anthology, award-winning author Anna Goldsworthy chooses brilliant pieces that provoke, unveil, engage and enlighten. From the election of Donald Trump to digital disruption, from the passing of rock gods to the wonders of Australian slang, these essays get to the heart of what’s happening in Australia and the world. Contributors include Shannon Burns, Barry Humphries, Stan Grant, Keane Shum, Richard Cooke, Nick Feik, Michael Adams, Micheline Lee, Mandy Sayer, Tim Flannery, Sonya Hartnett, Harriet Riley, John Clarke, Jennifer Rutherford, Amanda Niehaus, Sam Vincent, Lech Blaine, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Moreno Giovannoni, Janine Mikosza, Melissa Howard, Helen Garner, James Wood, J.M. Coetzee, Robert Skinner, Sebastian Smee and Anwen Crawford. Anna Goldsworthy is the author of Piano Lessons, Welcome to Your New Life and the Quarterly Essay Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny. Her writing has appeared in the Monthly, the Age, the Australian, the Adelaide Review and The Best Australian Essays. She is also a concert pianist, with several recordings to her name.

In The Best Australian Stories, acclaimed writer Maxine Beneba Clarke brings together our country’s leading literary talents. Herself an award-winning short-story writer, Beneba Clarke selects exceptional stories that resonate with experience and truth, and celebrate the art of storytelling. Previous contributors include Kate Grenville, Tony Birch, David Malouf, Kirsten Tranter, Anna Krien, Georgia Blain, Peter Goldsworthy, Fiona McFarlane, Elizabeth Harrower, Ryan O’Neill and Romy Ash. Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. In 2015 her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the ABIA for Best Literary Fiction and the Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her critically acclaimed memoir, The Hate Race (2016), was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, the Indie Award for Non-Fiction and the Stella Prize. She is also the author of a picture book, The Patchwork Bike (2016), several poetry collections, and is a contributor to the Saturday Paper.

Award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic Sarah Holland-Batt takes the helm again as editor of this year’s Best Australian Poems. Previous contributors include Judith Beveridge, Stephen Edgar, Fiona Wright, Clive James, Lisa Gorton, Robert Adamson, Dorothy Porter, John Kinsella, David Malouf, Cate Kennedy and Les Murray. Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of The Hazards (UQP, 2015), which won the poetry prize at the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, and Aria (UQP, 2008), which won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Award, and the FAW Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards. She is presently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Queensland University of Technology and the poetry editor of Island.

'The essay creates a place for slow thought on hectic subjects, and that is what the best of this year's crop manage to do.' GEORDIE WILLIAMSON In The Best Australian Essays 2016, Geordie Williamson curates the year's best non-fiction writing from Australia's finest writers. The result is a collection that reads as a wake-up call- from Jo Chandler on the devastating bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and Richard Flanagan on the Syrian exodus to Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani's inside account of life on Manus Island. There is also space for Bowie, TV box-sets and Aussie rules. Spanning politics, music, literature, art, ecology, linguistics and more, this anthology showcases the nation's most eloquent and insightful writing. Maggie Mackellar In Sympathy- A Fugue * Ashley Hay The Bus Stop * Rebecca Giggs Whale Fall * Anwen Crawford The Noise Made By People * Melinda Harvey She Thinks She Is The Boss * Mireille Juchau The Most Holy Object in the House * Fiona Wright A World of Bald White Days * Vicki Hastrich Things Seen * Helen Garner This Old Self * Tegan Bennett Daylight Vagina * Jennifer Mills Detroit, I Do Mind * Fiona McGregor The Experience Machine * Michelle de Kretser Like a Thief in the Night * Jo Chandler Grave Barrier Reef * Anna Spargo-Ryan How to Love Football * Peter Goldsworthy Review of Chorale at the Crossing by Peter Porter * Gregory Day Review of John Kinsella's 'Drowning in Wheat' * J.M. Coetzee Introduction to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier * James Bradley David Bowie- Loving the Alien * Galarrwuy Yunupingu Rom Watangu * Richard Flanagan Notes on the Syrian Exodus * Adam Rivett 35,000 Pieces of Converted Culture * Michael Winkler The Great Red Whale * Behrouz Boochani Life on Manus- The Island of the Damned * Martin McKenzie-Murray On Mass Shootings * Guy Rundle On Modern Terrorism * Clive James Play All * Julian Burnside What Sort of Country Are We? * Kim Scott Both Hands Full

In this remarkable memoir, Anna Goldsworthy recalls her first steps towards a life in music, from childhood piano lessons with a local jazz muso to international success as a concert pianist. As she discovers passion and ambition, and confronts doubt and disappointment, she learns about much more than tone and technique. This is a story of the getting of wisdom, tender and bittersweet. With wit and affection, Goldsworthy captures the hopes and uncertainties of youth, the fear and exhilaration of performing, and the complex bonds between teacher and student. An unforgettable cast of characters joins her: her family; her friends and rivals; and her teacher, Mrs Sivan, who inspires and challenges her in equal measure, and who transforms what seems an impossible dream into something real and sustaining.

The question didn't seem to be so much why we swim, as where and how we swim, and with whom. Also, where we fail to swim, water threatening to flood our lungs or the lungs of others, as well as where we rise and float. Ingrid Horrocks had few aspirations to swimming mastery, but she had always loved being in the water. She set out on a solo swimming journey, then abandoned it for a different kind of immersion altogether – one which led her to more deeply examine relationships, our ecological crisis, and responsibilities to those around us. Where We Swim ranges from solitary swims in polluted rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, to dips in pools in Arizona and the Peruvian Amazon, and in the ocean off Western Australia and the south coast of England. Part memoir, part travel and nature writing, this generous and absorbing book is about being a daughter, sister, partner, mother, and above all a human being living among other animals on this watery planet.

The Sydney Review of Books is Australia's leading space for longform literary criticism. Now celebrating five years online, the SRB has published more than five hundred essays by almost two hundred writers. To mark this occasion, The Australian Face collects some of the best essays published in the SRB on Australian fiction, poetry and non-fiction. The essays in this anthology are contributions to the ongoing argument about the condition and purpose and evolving shape of Australian literature. They reflect the ways in which discussions about the state of the literary culture are constantly reaching beyond themselves to consider wider cultural and political issues. The Sydney Review of Books was established in 2013 out of frustration at the diminishing public space for Australian criticism on literature. There's even less space for literature in our newspapers and broadcast media now. The Sydney Review of Books, however, is thriving, as the essays in The Australian Face show. Here, you'll read essays on well-known figures such as Christos Tsiolkas, Alexis Wright, Michelle de Kretser and Helen Garner, alongside considerations of the work of writers who less frequently receive mainstream attention, such as Lesbia Harford and Moya Costello.

How do two parents who are blind take their children to the park? How is a mother with dwarfism treated when she walks her child down the street? How do Deaf parents know when their baby cries in the night? When writer and musician Eliza Hull was pregnant with her first child, like most parents-to-be she was a mix of excited and nervous. But as a person with a disability, there were added complexities. She wondered: Will the pregnancy be too hard? Will people judge me? Will I cope with the demands of parenting? More than 15 per cent of Australian households have a parent with a disability, yet their stories are rarely shared, their experiences almost never reflected in parenting literature. In We’ve Got This, twenty-five parents who identify as Deaf, disabled or chronically ill discuss the highs and lows of their parenting journeys and reveal that the greatest obstacles lie in other people’s attitudes. The result is a moving, revelatory and empowering anthology. As Rebekah Taussig writes, ‘Parenthood can tangle with grief and loss. Disability can include joy and abundance. And goddammit – disabled parents exist.’ Contributors include Jacinta Parsons, Kristy Forbes, Graeme Innes, Jessica Smith, Jax Jacki Brown, Nicole Lee, Elly May Barnes, Neangok Chair, Renay Barker-Mulholland, Micheline Lee and Shakira Hussein. We’ve Got This will appeal to readers of Growing Up Disabled in Australia and other titles in the Growing Up series.

An uplifting collection of personal essays celebrating the various forms of family, featuring contributions from some of Australia’s most exciting writers and thinkers