Almost true stories for a post-truth world.
A Manhattan party on election night. Liberal media types gather with big grins and high-end canapés to watch the Trump-Clinton results come in, expecting a smooth victory for Hillary. [click to continue…]
John Sharpe
“I have had a charmed life! I have been electrocuted, thrown by bucking horses, had a snake in my pants, been horned out of the yards by wild cattle, caught in a windmill, bashed, machine-gunned, torpedoed and chased by an elephant. [click to continue…]
Acclaimed scientist Tim Flannery investigates exciting new technologies currently being developed to address our most pressing environmental threats in a book that presents a positive future for us and our planet.
Climate change, food production and toxic pollution present huge challenges, but, as Flannery shows, we already have innovative, practical and inspiring solutions. Solar energy has, until now, been limited to supplying power only when the sun is shining. But new technology using concentrated sunlight to provide intense heat energy that can be effectively stored overcomes this problem, providing clean renewable power around the clock. [click to continue…]
The man flipped the piece of wood and the coins spun up into the air above his head and dropped down on to the carpet.
What right did I possess, as a child of survivors, to recreate an account of the Holocaust as if I was there? In writing The Fiftieth Gate, Mark Baker describes a journey from despair and death towards hope and life; it is the story of a son who enters his parents’ memories and, inside the darkness, finds light. In his evocative prose, Baker takes us to this place of horror, and then brings us back to reflect on these events and remember: ‘Never again’.
In April 1995, a plain brown colt was passed in at the famous Easter Yearling Sales in Sydney, virtually unnoticed. He would grow up to become an icon of the Australian turf, a national treasure. Might and Power was a giant in a golden era of exceptional thoroughbreds: the horse of a lifetime for owner Nick Moraitis, the horse of hope for trainer Jack Denham, and the horse of redemption for jockey Jim Cassidy. [click to continue…]
This is the story of the families of the plains – obsessed with their land and history, their culture and mythology – and of the man who ventured into their world. [click to continue…]
As a reporter, Moorehead witnessed many of the great historical events of the mid-20th century: the Spanish Civil War and both world wars, Cold War espionage, and decolonisation in Africa. He debated strategy with Churchill and Gandhi, fished with Hemingway, and drank with Graham Greene, Ava Gardner and Truman Capote. As well as being a regular contributor to the New Yorker, in 1956 Moorehead wrote the first significant book about the Gallipoli campaign. [click to continue…]
In The Best Australian Stories 2013, Kim Scott assembles the most exceptional short fiction of the last year and invites readers to build ‘a rare and intimate relationship’ with these talented writers, one that is ‘essential to storytelling in print, whether on paper or screen.’ [click to continue…]
The year is 1869. After a brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae is arrested for the crime.
A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but the police and the courts must decide what drove him to murder the local village constable. And why did he kill his other two victims? [click to continue…]
