This week in your Meanjin reading list we draw your attention to American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, current national correspondent for The Atlantic, and former Middle-East and Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. More

Today in your Meanjin-issued homework we have the narrative journalism of David Grann, reporter for The New Yorker, and author of The Lost City of Z and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann has a preternatural gift for arranging the raw facts of a news story into a compelling narrative, complete with vividly drawn characters and startling plot twists. More

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I recently spent about a week trawling through the internet, hunting down and devouring everything I could find by this writer, and then selfishly cornering friends at parties and trying to retell his jokes. Sullivan is a reporter for GQ and Harpers, and the southern editor of The Paris Review. More

I am not a person who generally feels well-informed; for a year I called our Prime Minister Julia Jillard. So I’ve been reading a series of remedial primers, the Oxford Very Short Introduction. More

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The Best Australian Essays anthology performs this annual reflection for us as a nation, canvassing the prominent figures, issues and events that captured our imagination in the preceding 12 months. More

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If one accepts naturalistic as a lifestyle corresponding to present day society, The Doll has lost its relevance. There are no longer itinerant cane-cutting teams, pub life and barmaids have changed greatly since the Aussie male preserve of the public bar was lost, and the social attitude towards unions outside marriage has changed entirely. There seems no reason why audiences nowadays should accept The Doll as anything but a naturalistic play with the set values of its own particular period. More

The images of emptiness weren’t so much emptiness to me, as promise. A kind of lure. Particularly a picture of stockmen on a veranda, looking out toward this undeviating horizon line. And they seemed to me to be in this vast, wonderful, mysterious silence that I’d never before imagined, having come from South London and being brought up as a Londoner. And of course those photos were taken by Sid Nolan – I didn’t know that at the time. More

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How refreshing then to end the year with a good news story about a print work. A story that flies in the face of the above trend and that contradicts the accepted narrative concerning the future of the novel. More

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This provides a clear rock and a hard place bind for emerging writers: how are you to fund the completion of that first book when you are not eligible to apply for any funding? Having a book contract or long form commission of significant length signed off on doesn’t put you in an eligible category either. More

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Where previously he imagined a dystopian not-too-distant future in which near every impending global disaster was realised, in this novel the threat comes from the inside — the emotions, behaviours and actions of families, and the ways that their after-effects can ripple across other members’ lives. The novel’s central device is a kind of wish fulfilment made real. As each character struggles to cope with the stresses of family life, Amsterdam offers them a yearned for supernatural ability to help them on their way. More