New Quarterly Essay event with Joëlle Gergis
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In this powerful essay, Joëlle Gergis, a leading climate scientist, depicts the likely future in vivid and credible detail. It's an essay about government paralysis and what is at stake for all of us. It’s about getting real, in the face of an unprecedented threat.
JUST ANNOUNCED!
On guns and money (no lawyers)
“There are no people born for war.” These heartbreakingly wise words were spoken by an ordinary Ukrainian on Foreign Correspondent (ABC, Thursday 9th May). They had special resonance for me as I had just read Marrickville author Sara Haddad’s beautiful novella, The Sunbird. Nabila is a child in Palestine in 1948 and an old woman in Sydney attending protest marches in 2024. Back in Palestine a school teacher attempts to explain the coming partition to his students. Nabila wonders, ‘How can a new country be put inside a country that was already there? …What would happen to the people who were already there? Would they be squashed into the ground like ants under a boot?’ Haddad finishes her deceptively simple, affecting book
with an Addendum that summarises the Palestine/Israel conflict from the 1930s to now. Did I know, or had I forgotten, that during what is known as the Nakba from 1947 to 1949, 15,000 Palestinians were killed and more than 750,000 people were displaced? The Sunbird is launched at Gleebooks on Tuesday 28th May
As it’s budget week, I shall surprise you all with a book about economics, which I hasten to add, is not available here until August (special order now!). The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy by Natalie Foster draws on the work of the Economic Security Forum of which she is a director. The book questions the prevailing story of American economics - ‘Total faith in the market, zero faith in government, and each of us as individuals pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and responsible for our own success - were billed as inescapable truths, like gravity or algebra. But’, Foster writes,’...they were the stuff of myths.’ (as those on the left have always known!) Woe betide when
Americans vote in the biggest myth-maker of them all, as is likely. Poor fellow, that country.
On a lighter note, I am loving a debut novel titled (underwhelmingly) Real Americans by Rachel Khong about a contemporary Chinese-American family. Told in the first person by Lily, her son Nick and her mother May (in China during the Cultural Revolution), this is a novel full of ideas, about genetics, choice, truth and forgiveness. Extremely well-written for a debut, and with well-drawn characters, Real Americans is a novel in which to immerse yourself.
Hope you all enjoy the Sydney Writers’ Festival. I’ll be keeping the homefires burning in Glebe.
See you soon
Morgan
