Like Franz Kafka’s The Trial for the post-truth era, at once “surreal, polemical, and fun” (The Telegraph). Sterling Beckenbauer is plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world one morning when they are attacked, then unfairly arrested, in their neighborhood in London. With the help of their friends, Sterling hosts a trial of their own in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account. Sterling Karat Gold, in the words of Kamila Shamsie, is “a madly brilliant and deeply sane novel that reveals surrealism as possibly the most effective way of talking about the political moment we find ourselves in.” In it, Isabel Waidner concocts a world replete with bullfighters, high fashion, DIY theater, the Beach Boys, and time-traveling spaceships. The acclaimed winner of the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction that breaks the mold and extends the possibilities of the form, this novel explores the phantasmagoric nature of contemporary life, especially for nonbinary migrants, and daringly revises how solidarity and justice might be sought and won. Sterling Karat Gold couldn’t be a better North American introduction to a writer with an irresistible style and unforgettable vision.

Helen Garner’s gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiece—the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex. When Nora falls in love with Javo, she is caught in the web of his addiction; and as he moves between loving her and leaving, between his need for her and promises broken, Nora’s life becomes an intense dance of loving and trying to let go. Helen Garner is one of Australia’s finest authors. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her novels include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Spare Room. I rolled and rolled in the water, deafening my ears while I thought of, and discarded, all the reasons why I shouldn’t go. I popped up, hanging on to the rail, hair streaming on my neck. ‘OK. I’ll come.’ Javo was looking at me. So, afterwards, it is possible to see the beginning of things, the point at which you had already plunged in, while at the time you thought you were only testing the water with your toe. ‘Garner is a natural storyteller.’ James Wood, New Yorker ‘Her use of language is sublime.’ Scotsman ‘This is the power of Garner’s writing. She drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this reason Garner has become part of us all.’ Australian ‘Its embattled characters are so real that by the last page you feel not just that you have read a magnificent novel but that you have experienced life itself.’ The Times on The Spare Room 'What Garner offers in these novels is an alternative to the cloying metafiction of the late 20th century and the washed-out realism of the 21st. They are undeniably of their time – the 1970s commitment to the liberating possibilities of sex, drugs and communal living in Monkey Grip, the hangover nursed in the 1980s in The Children’s Bach – but they also belong to a literary epoch we think of as long gone, as they earnestly strive to resurrect a modernist art of estrangement.' London Review of Books

' . . . embracing anger is a political act. This is not a personal project but a social one-being passive and perpetually afraid of your power reinforces the status quo, and I am no longer interested in that. Anger is a complex emotion, which is exactly why my child-brain suppresses it, and exactly why we as a society are afraid of it. Anger teaches us that not everything has to be either/or.' In a profound and personal essay, Lucia Osborne-Crowley writes on learning to embrace anger as a multi-faceted emotion. Anger can be an act of caring, anger can be a force for personal power, and inter-personal good; anger, she says, 'can sit alongside love and hope and connection rather than being their opposite.' Guy Rundle studies the rise of the Knowledge Class, the laptop tapping workers at the core of the west's new economy, and details the challenge — and opportunity — this growing group poses for traditional progressive politics. Na'ama Carlin found her first pregnancy challenging, a minefield of existential and practical complication. Then she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. Author Alice Pung writes on the vexed politics of 'diversity' in the Australian publishing industry. Futurist Mark Pesce is anxious about the social implications of the Facebook 'metaverse', but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Critic and curator Chris McAuliffe looks at the hidden and very complicated history of the Australian flag. El Gibbs writes on the hidden pandemic: of living with both covid and disability. Other essays from Declan Fry, Martin Langford, Gemma Carey, Madeleine Gray, Jill Giese, Bruce Buchan and more. Memoir from Alice Bishop, Alexander Wells, Dominic Gordon and Hannah Preston. New fiction from Jennifer Mills, Ouyang Yu and Christopher Raja. New poetry from Adam Aitken, Lucy Dougan, Ashleigh Synnott, Stephen Edgar, Svetlana Sterlin, Junie Huang and more. Reviews from Millie Bayliss, Imogen Dewey, Hasib Hourani, Thabani Tshuma and Rosie Ofori Ward.

British Marxist Criticism provides selective but extensive annotated bibliographies, introductory essays, and important pieces of work from each of eight British critics who sought to explain literary production according to the principles of Marxism.