‘Some essays in this collection plunged me into thought. Some caused me to weep. Some brought tears of laughter. Some essays won me over by the power of their imagination. Some by their analytic clarity. Some by their excruciating honesty. Some by the pain of things past or present faced without flinching.’ – Robert Manne In The Best Australian Essays 2014, Robert Manne assembles his picks of contemporary non-fiction writing. Tim Winton reflects on the impact of landscape on the Australian character; Helen Garner remembers her mother with a raw and stirring poignancy; Christos Tsiolkas wonders how the Left forgot their origins; Tim Flannery traces the history of the Great Barrier Reef and fears its destruction. With essays traversing madness, liberty under the rule of Tony Abbott, the enslaving of horses and the legacy of Doris Lessing, this sharp collection offers lucid insight, shrewd understanding and heartbreaking empathy. Moreno Giovannoni • Rozanna Lilley • Caroline Baum • Guy Rundle • Peter Conrad • Jessie Cole • Karen Hitchcock • Antonia Hayes • Luke Ryan • Helen Garner • Sybille Smith • Christian Ryan • Dennis Glover • Don Watson • Rachel Nolan • David Marr • J.M. Coetzee • Nicolas Rothwell • David Malouf • Clive James • Carrie Tiffany • Robyn Davidson • Neil Murray • Noel Pearson • Christos Tsiolkas • Luke Mogelson • Tim Flannery • Tim Winton

'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

‘The art of the story is mostly about the journey, and the economy of means with which the writers here carry us a great distance is at times breathtaking.’ – Amanda Lohrey In The Best Australian Stories 2014, Patrick White Award–winning author Amanda Lohrey selects the outstanding short fiction of the year. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes raw, and always a ‘shot of adrenaline to the mind and heart’, this collection features exciting new voices alongside the established and admired. The edges of reality blur in a corporate lawyer’s tale of working in a 1200-storey glass tower. A prized coffee table becomes the focus of a father’s anxieties and frustrations. Tense and fractured lines of communication shape the life of an interpreter on Christmas Island. Imaginative, remarkable, intimate – this unmissable anthology celebrates the art of consummate storytelling. Julienne Van Loon • Shaun Prescott • Lucy Neave • Anthony Panegyres • Nicola Redhouse • Edwina Shaw • Claire Corbett • Fiona Place • Kate Elkington • Arabella Edge • Claire Aman • Angela Meyer • J.Y.L. Koh • Rebekah Clarkson • Ryan O'Neill • Mark Smith • Anna Krien • David Brooks • Leah Swann • Kirsten Tranter • Lisa Jacobson • Melanie Joosten

The human desire for patterned language is as strong as the need for narrative.—Geoff Page In The Best Australian Poems 2015, you will find the who’s who of contemporary poets and the pick of new voices. Sometimes satirical, sometimes erotic, covering family, religion, war and mortality, Geoff Page’s selection celebrates the vital, the vigorous and the graceful voices that populate our poetry scene. Robert Adamson • Jordie Albiston • Judith Beveridge • Eileen Chong • Joe Dolce • Lin Van Hek • Nigel Roberts • Robyn Rowland • Jennifer Compton • Kevin Hart • Lisa Gorton • Clive James • Rozanna Lilley • Tony Page • Michael Sharkey • Chris Wallace-Crabbe • Fiona Wright • Jakob Ziguras • Les Murray • Fay Zwicky • Jamie Grant • Lucy Dougan • Ali Cobby Eckermann • Kevin Brophy • Billy Marshall Stoneking • Bruce Dawe • Anne Elvey • Geoff Goodfellow • Jennifer Maiden • AND MANY MORE . . .

This anthology of the year's best investigative business writing explores the secret dealings of an elite Wall Street society and uncovers the crimes and misadventures of the young founder of Silk Road, the wildly successful online illegal goods site known as the "eBay of vice." It reveals how the Fed dithered while the financial crisis unfolded and explains why the leaders of a two-trillion-dollar bond fund went to war with each other. Articles from the best newspapers and magazines in the country delve into how junk-food companies use science to get you to eat more and how Amazon dodges the tax man how J.Crew revitalized itself by transforming its creative process and Russell Brand went deep on media and marketing after his GQ Awards speech went haywire. Best Business Writing 2014 includes provocative essays on the NFL's cover-ups and corporate welfare, Silicon Valley's ultralibertarian culture, and the feminist critique of Sheryl Sandberg's career-advice book for women, Lean-In. Stories about toast, T-shirt making, and the slow death of the funeral business show the best writers can find worthy tales in even the most mundane subjects.

In modern Australia, productivity is all that matters, our leaders tell us. Economic growth above all else. But is this really what we, the people, want? Does it make our lives and our communities better? If the high priests of economics want the credit for Australia’s economic growth over the last three decades, they must also wear the blame for the social destruction that has accompanied it – the devastation of once prosperous industrial centres and the suburbs they sustained, as factories closed and workers were forced to abandon their trades. The social costs of this ‘economic modernisation’ have been immense, but today are virtually ignored. The fracturing of communities continues apace. An Economy Is Not a Society is a passionate and personal J’accuse against the people whose abandonment of moral policy making has ripped the guts out of Australia’s old industrial communities, robbed the country of manufacturing knowhow, reversed our national ethos of egalitarianism and broken the sense of common purpose that once existed between rulers and ruled. Those in power, Dennis Glover argues, must abandon the idea that a better society is purely about offering individuals more dollars in their pockets. What we desperately need is a conversation about the lives, working conditions, jobs and communities we want for ourselves and our families – and we need to choose a future that is designed to benefit all the Australian people, not just some. Dennis Glover is the son and brother of Dandenong factory workers. He grew up in Doveton before studying at Monash University and King’s College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in history. He has worked for two decades as an academic, newspaper columnist, political adviser and speechwriter to Labor leaders and senior ministers.

The best of the best This essential book takes a decade of Best Australian Stories and selects the most outstanding short fiction by the country's finest writers. These stories range widely in style and subject matter: there is drama and comedy, subtlety and extravagance, tales of suspense, love, fantasy, grief and revenge. Together they showcas...

Are we living on borrowed time? From climate change to the Murdoch empire, from refugees to WikiLeaks –Robert Manne applies his brilliant mind to the issues and people that shape our world. This provocative and informative book includes essays on Donald Trump’s links to Russia, Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, the ideas driving Islamic State, and Jonathan Franzen’s views on climate activism. In the title essay, Manne shares a life-altering personal story that is frank, moving and unforgettable. Robert Manne is emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University. His books include The Petrov Affair, The Culture of Forgetting, Left, Right, Left, Making Trouble and The Mind of the Islamic State. He has written three Quarterly Essays and is a regular contributor to the Monthly and the Guardian.

Good daughters hold their tongues, obey their elders and let their families determine their destiny. Rebellious daughters are just the opposite. In Rebellious Daughters, some of Australia’s most talented female writers share intimate and touching stories of rebellion and independence as they defy the expectations of parents and society to find their place in the world. Powerful, funny and poignant, these stories explore everything from getting caught in seedy nightclubs to lifelong family conflicts and marrying too young. Beautifully written, profoundly honest and always relatable, every story is a unique retelling that celebrates the rebellious daughter within us all. Not every woman is a mother, grandmother, aunty or sister – but all women are daughters. Rebellious Daughters contributors: Jane Caro, Jamila Rizvi, Susan Wyndham, Rebecca Starford, Marion Halligan, Amra Pajalic, Jo Case, Leah Kaminsky, Michelle Law, Caroline Baum, Rochelle Siemienowicz, Nicola Redhouse, Krissy Kneen, Silvia Kwon and Eliza-Jane Henry-Jones.

A baby cries; a mother exits, leaving her family behind; a child finally begins to talk; a father stops breathing. Rozanna Lilley is a social anthropologist, autism researcher, and Oscar's mum. Oscar is on the autism spectrum, which means he has a particular way of being in the world and understanding the lives of those around him. As Rozanna and her husband Neil navigate Oscar's childhood, the author reflects upon her own childhood and adolescence, spent in a libertarian, self-consciously bohemian household first in Perth and then in Sydney presided over by her parents, the writers Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley. Through personal essays, Lilley works through the ongoing repercussions of childhood trauma and captures Oscar's rich inner world, as revealed through his vivid fantasy life and curious observations. Do Oysters Get Bored? is a shimmering examination of an eccentric family, the complexities of care and the toll of grief in middle-age. A set of poems serve as a counterpoint to the essays in this directly charming and surprisingly funny account of daily life. [Subject: Memoir, Literature, Autism, Poetry]