On Women brings together Susan Sontag’s most fearless and incisive writing on women, a crucial aspect of her work that has not until now received the attention it deserves

For the most part written in the 1970s during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag’s essays are strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. At times powerfully in sync and at others powerfully at odds with them, they are always characteristically original in their examinations of the ‘biological division of labour’, the double-standard for ageing and the dynamics of women’s powerlessness and women’s power.

As Merve Emre writes in her introduction, ‘They offer us the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand- to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas and the world.’

Izumi Suzuki had ideas of how things might be done differently, ideas that paid little the laws of physics, or the laws of the courts.

In this new collection her skewed imagination is applied to some classic science fiction and fantasy tropes:

A philandering husbands get bestial punishment from a wife who’d kept her own secrets; time-travelling pop music aficionados stir up temporal bother when their nostalgia carries them away; idle high school students find themselves dropped into a adventure in another dimension, but aren’t all that impressed; a misfit band of space pirates find their live on the stars amounts to space; Emma, the Bovary-like character from Terminal Boredom’s ‘Forgotten’, lands herself in another bizarre romantic pickle.
Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other, and these 11 stories offer readers the opportunity to explore this singular writer’s work further.

The first in an epic fantasy trilogy from Sunday Times bestselling author L.R. Lam.

The last male dragon. A desperate thief. A bond that will save the world… or shatter it.

Long ago, humans betrayed dragons, stealing their magic and banishing them to a dying world. Centuries later, their descendants worship dragons as gods. But the ‘gods’ remember, and they do not forgive.

Since they were orphaned, Arcady has scraped a living thieving on the streets of Vatra, dreaming of life among the nobility – and revenge. When the chance arises to steal a powerful artefact from the bones of the Plaguebringer, the most hated person in Lumet history, they jump at it, for its magic holds the key to their dreams. But the spell has unintended consequences, and drags Everen – the last male dragon, who was once foretold to save his kind – into the human world.

Trapped, and disguised as a human, Everen soon realises that the key to his destiny, and to regaining his true power, lies in Arcady. All he needs to do is convince one little thief to bond with him completely – body, mind, and soul – and then kill them… Yet the closer the two become, the greater the risk both their worlds will shatter.

‘Tight, tense, smoldering, and wonderfully queer.’ – Mike Brooks

‘Another a piece of the puzzle that is unearthing women’s stories from the past … a beautifully told history.’ – Books+Publishing

A joyous look at the history of lesbian and bisexual women in Australia – from convict times, through suffrage and liberation to today

Throughout history, women’s relationships have been downgraded and diminished. Instead of lovers, they are documented as particularly close friends; the type that made out, worked, lived, and are buried together. Besties, if you will. She and Her Pretty Friend aims to dispel this myth. It is an exploration of women’s relationships through Australian history, each chapter centring on a specific person, couple, or time period.

With a focus on women such as Anne Drysdale, Lesbia Harford, and Cecilia John, She and Her Pretty Friend centres on stories of those who have remained obscured and less spoken of in the historical narrative. Throughout this retelling of Australian history, Scrimshaw explores how colonisation altered ideas of sexuality, how the suffrage movement in Australia created opportunities for queer women, and details her own part in creating queer history. Rather than continuing to deny a queer past, Scrimshaw encourages readers – and other historians – to open themselves to the idea that perhaps some people were more to each other than just ‘roommates’.

 ‘Next to impossible to put down… Exciting, mysterious, and totally satisfying.’ – STEPHEN KING

The islands of Prospera lie in a vast ocean: in splendid isolation from the rest of humanity, or whatever remains of it…

Citizens of the main island enjoy privileged lives, attended to by the support staff who live on a cramped neighbouring island, where whispers begin to grow into cries for revolution. Meanwhile, life for Prosperans is perfection – and when it’s not, their bodies are sent to the mysterious third island: a facility named The Nursery, to be rebooted and restart life afresh.

Proctor Bennett is a Ferryman, who shepherds the soon-to-be retired into the unknown. He never questioned his work until the day he is delivered a cryptic message: “The world is not the world…”

These simple words unravel something that he has secretly suspected. They seep into strange dreams – of the stars and the sea – and the unshakeable feeling that someone is trying to tell him something important. Something greater than anyone could possibly imagine, which could change the fate of humanity itself…

‘A mind-bending novel full of big ideas and a rollercoaster’s worth of twists and turns – so powerful and thrilling!’ – ANDY WEIR

Who is the Last Ronin? In a future, battle-ravaged New York City, a lone surviving Turtle embarks on a seemingly hopeless mission seeking justice for the family he lost. From legendary TMNT co-creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, get ready for the final story of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles three decades in the making!

What terrible events destroyed his family and left New York a crumbling, post-apocalyptic nightmare? All will be revealed in this climactic Turtle tale that sees longtime friends becoming enemies and new allies emerging in the most unexpected places. Can the surviving Turtle triumph?

Eastman and Laird are joined by writer Tom Waltz, who penned the first 100 issues of IDW’s ongoing TMNT series, and artists Esau & Isaac Escorza (Heavy Metal) and Ben Bishop (The Far Side of the Moon) with an Introduction by filmmaker Robert Rodriguez!

Collects the complete five-issue miniseries in a new graphic novel, an adventure as fulfilling for longtime Turtles fans as it is accessible for readers just discovering the heroes in a half shell.

The course of Australian art changed in 1971. Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula were central to the formulation of a radical new form of desert art. Standing out among an exceptional cohort of painting men at Papunya (a remote government settlement in Central Australia) this ‘gang of four’ closely related artists deployed their inherited iconography while exploring poetic possibilities offered by paint on canvas. Each was responsible for innovations that still influence contemporary desert art.

Papunya Tula art did not emerge from barren ground, and John Kean’s fine-grained study reveals the artform’s surprising sources, from its wellspring in the ceremonies of Central Australia to the popular culture of the mid-twentieth century. Rather than commencing his analysis in 1971, John Kean foregrounds the contested intercultural context in which the artists came into manhood, showing how they achieved their agency, first as stockmen and labourers, then as artists.

This lavishly illustrated book draws on social history, visual anthropology, as well as formal art analysis to identify how the key innovations that informed contemporary desert art were realised. Dot, Circle and Frame examines the lived experience and totemic associations of the artists to show just how a new vision of ceremony and Country was assembled. This book leads the reader to a deeper understanding of a critical juncture, as four artists claimed a pivotal space in the history of Australian art.

In this unexpected memoir, written in a creative burst of just a few months in 2022, Sam Neill tells the story of how he became one of the world’s most celebrated actors, who has worked with everyone from Meryl Streep to Isabel Adjani, from Jeff Goldblum to Sean Connery, from Steven Spielberg to Jane Campion.

By his own account, his career has been a series of unpredictable turns of fortune. Born in 1947 in Northern Ireland, he emigrated to New Zealand at the age of seven. His family settled in Dunedin on the South Island, but young Sam was sent away to boarding school in Christchurch, where he was hopeless at sports and discovered he enjoyed acting.

But how did you become an actor in New Zealand in the 1960 and 1970s where there was no film industry? After university he made documentary films while also appearing in occasional amateur productions of Shakespeare. In 1977 he took the lead in Sleeping Dogs, the first feature made in New Zealand in more than a decade, a project that led to a major role in Gillian Armstrong’s celebrated My Brilliant Career.

And after that Sam Neill found his way, sometimes by accident, into his own brilliant career. He has worked around the world, an actor who has moved effortlessly from blockbuster to art house to TV, from Dr Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park movies to The Piano and Peaky Blinders.

Did I Ever Tell You This? is a joy to read, a marvellous and often very funny book, the work of a natural storyteller who is a superb observer of other people, and who writes with love and warmth about his family. It is also his account of his life outside film, especially in Central Otago where he established Two Paddocks, his vineyard famous for its pinot noir.