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“Pärtel and Leemet—those are heathen names. When you come to live in the village, you’ll be christened, and you’ll get names from the Bible. For instance, my name used to be Vambola, but for many years now I’ve had the name Johannes. And my daughter’s name is Magdaleena. Isn’t that beautiful? Names from the Bible are all beautiful. The whole world uses them,

The Frog of the North is a great snake, the biggest of all, much bigger than the king of the snakes. He is as big as a forest and he can fly. He has enormous wings. When he rises in the air, he covers the sun and the moon. In ancient times he used to rise often in the sky and devour all our enemies who came to that shore in their boats. After he devoured them, we took their possessions. So we were rich and powerful

In 1985 journalist Mark Schwartz agreed to ghostwrite a business book for Donald Trump. In a New Yorker article reflecting on his role decades later, Schwartz notes that in The Art of the Deal, ‘I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is.’ The New Yorker article explains how: ‘In his journal, Schwartz describes the process of trying to make Trump’s voice palatable in the book.

Although we don’t know for sure that Homer existed as a person, we do know that a society of poets called the Homeridae did. Some scholars believe that the name Homer was back-extracted from the name of this society — they claimed to be ‘children of Homer”, hence the name. Homeridae means ‘sons of hostages’, so some have theorised that they were the descendants of prisoners of war.

The boys
OMAR MUSA

The boys are turning mad.
The boys are turning circles in the sky.
The boys are swooping down
with bass-heavy hearts & sharp talons,
plucking the eyes of cows & dismembering doves.

The boys are turning ferocious.

The boys are growing up
with garlands of nuts, bolts & knucklebones
around their necks
Pistons plunge
in their forearms & jaws,
petrol churns
in the chambers of their chests

James Patterson, a prodigious literary figure and the world’s bestselling author (at least 114 New York Times bestsellers), sustains his output year after year by working with a stable of co-authors. His name looms large on his covers, but Patterson doesn’t actually write his books. Instead, he provides a detailed outline, then hires someone else to do the actual writing, while providing feedback to then.

Sentences and paragraphs in a book arrange the author’s meaning for the reader. The patterns the words follow once they are born, and the way we organise them, help them to convey something useful, interesting or emotionally involving.
When we begin the adventure of reading, we do so immersed in a cultural and sociological context – we experience how stories works as we learn to read when we are young.

fly in fly out fly in fly out
ALLAN BOYD (AKA THE ANTIPOET)

fly in fly out fly in fly out
and she’s on another swing
a roundabout of airports
another pilbara narrative
racking up the qantas points
at the exit seat, inside a novel
pindan fingers
pindan boots
fly in fly out fly in fly out
siren, rumble of blast
iron hills to rubble
at the next CAT ONE shutdown
we evacuate ourselves
in a debt cycle

There might be no greater career transformation in the history of pop music than Justin Bieber.

He exploded into the public consciousness as a fresh-faced teen idol in 2008, . . . to become the youngest solo male artist to ever top the Billboard chart with his infuriatingly catchy megahit ‘Baby’. For years, no artist was so simultaneously capable of bewitching young girls and angering fully grown adult men.

The 1998 Hottest 100’s biggest issue is its winning song – ‘Pretty Fly’ remains, no matter how much re contextualising and reappraising it may have received in the years since, simply awful. Yes, it’s meant to be sarcastic. Yes, The Offspring are in on the joke. That doesn’t make the song any more listenable.

Hilltop Hoods’ influence in Australian music is unmatched. Before Hilltop, Australian hip-hop was still very much in the developmental stage, with artists receiving little recognition or airplay. Hilltop changed that.

They paved the way for new Australian hip-hop artists to thrive, leading directly to future Hottest 100 songs such as ‘Boys Like You’ by 360, ‘Jimmy Richard’ by Drapht

The Hottest 100 was, for at least the first 20 years of its existence, a super rock-centric list. This started to change in 2010, when Angus & Julia Stone topped the countdown with their breezy acoustic folk. Followed by Goyte, Macklemore and Vance Joy, it looked like Australian music listeners might be moving away from rock, but it wasn’t clear the direction we were going.
Enter Chet Faker.

Before the printing press, manuscripts were copied out by monks. And inevitably this method of producing text led to many errors and variations in each version. Punctuation, spelling and grammar weren’t standardised, and in classical manuscripts scriptio continua was used – which meant that there were no spaces between words!

‘A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.’

Salman Rushdie

The one with close-bitten nails introduces himself as Castor and the other, who’s his brother, as Pollux. I wait for Pollux to say hello, but he just nods. At first I think he’s shy or a man of few words. But something tugs on me - the position of his lips, the extra effort he takes to swallow – and I know before Castor tells me. Pollux is an Avox. They have cut out his tongue and he will never speak again.

A common misconception of the Hottest 100 is that it’s a countdown of the best alternative music of the year. This is not quite correct.

The Hottest 100 is a countdown of people’s favourite music of the year – a subtle but crucial distinction, that gets to the heart of why we love it so much.

Because Hottest 100 voters are an odd bunch. We like weird shit. We love weird shit. The weirder the better, often.

The 2020s has introduced a far more diverse and varied breed of new-age music heroes for Generation Z. The most significant shift in diversity since the advent of the Hottest 100 seems to have come about for several reasons.
1. A generation of young people who are more socially aware and in tune with different communities and identities than any generation that has preceded them.

DECEMBER Favourites

13 December: Well well Cornelius by Howard Skempton

17 December: The Three Kings by Jonathan Dove

20 December: Nocturne in a minor by Chad Lawson

29 December: In the Bleak Mid-Winter by Gustav Holst arranged by Sheku Kanneh-Mason

I think of Haymitch, unmarried, no family, blotting out the world with drink. He could have had his choice of any woman in the district. And he chose solitude. Not solitude – that sounds too peaceful. More like solitary confinement. Was it because, having been in the arena, he knew it was better than risking the alternative? I had a taste of that alternative when they called Prim’s name on reaping day

I realise I detest Haymitch. No wonder the District 12 tributes never stand a chance. It isn’t just that we’ve been underfed and lack training. Some of our tributes have still been strong enough to make a go of it. But we rarely get sponsors and he’s a big part of the reason why. The rich people who back tributes – either because they’re betting on them or simply for the bragging rights of picking a winner

A mockingjay.
They’re funny birds and something of a slap in the face to the Capitol. During the rebellion, the Capitol bred a series of genetically altered animals as weapons. The common term for them was muttations, or sometimes mutts for short. One was a special bird called a jabberjay that had the ability to memorise and repeat whole human conversations. They were homing birds, exclusively male,

He tells the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens.

we were already running away again, me and my imagination. We were holding hands on the edge of the cliff by the North Sea, we were high, high up in a redwood tree, we were on a train to Paris, we were blue lipped in the river trying to swim to India. Or we were just fucking running. Down a steep and endless hill, she and I, holding hands. She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire.

Christmas Eve morning. Fever finally broken. I’m shopping at Cheapo’s, a store where the despair is auditory in the afterlife Muzak. Old people creaking through the grim endless aisles of canned crap, produce pyramids gleaming eerily under too-bright lights. The bananas here will never be edible—they will remain green before immediately turning black. Even the apples looked shined up in a way I do not trust

“I get that way too. Sometimes I’ll just drive around for hours. I won’t have a destination or anything. I used to go to bookstores but I can’t go in them anymore because I buy too many books. Last time I went into Ada books, I spent almost a hundred bucks. More than a hundred probably.”

I think of Sissy Spacek covered in pig’s blood as I watch Creepy Doll go through her closet to find the dress that, according to her, I’ll love so much I’ll want to have its dress babies. I look around her bedroom—the walls line with her many typewriters, her various prints of fairy-tale wolves and mythical creatures, an altar that is billowing a strange- smelling smoke. I drink more punch.

That’s when I see it perched on the outside sill of my window. Looking in, looking right at me, or so it seems. Twitching its nose. Slitty eyes black and shiny and peering right at me through the smudged glass. Floppy ears hanging on either side of its face like little-girl braids.
I scream until the sallow girl next door thumps the wall with her fist.

He meant to tell her about his grandmother, who’d lived to be ninety-four and didn’t recommend it. He meant to tell her to watch that Supaari character, there was something about him, and Anne shouldn’t let herself get blinded by sentiment. He meant to tell her how really happy he’d been, even these last few months. He thought he had a few days left. But death has its own agenda and its own logic,

Engineers don’t go to confession when they screw up; they find a fix. So Anne watched George deal with his own fear and guilt by starting an engineer’s rosary: a series of calculations involving the lander’s weight, drag, lift, thrust, the prevailing winds, their altitude above sea level, the rotational boost they’d get from their latitude on Rakhat, the distance to the Stella Maris at its closest approach

“See, that’s where it falls apart for me!” Anne cried. “What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can’t swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God’s in charge or He’s not. What did you do when the babies died, Emilio?”
“I cried,” he admitted. “I think sometimes that God needs us to cry His tears.”