I Need a Hero (Or At Least an AntiHero)

The giveaway is a double pass to a Taste Tour!

Dear Readers,

Thank you for the outpouring of support last week for the announcement of Seed! I’ve got the annotated printout of the manuscript here as I finish off the structural edits and today I had a meeting with my publicist to start discussing tour plans.

This week I also met with the other members of the Kat Muscat Fellowship Custodial Committee to discuss this year’s entries, and it really hit me that this winner will be the tenth, and I was the first, which means I’m coming up on a decade of writing. When I got some potentially-huge good news the other week I messaged Bridie and we joked about me finally being ‘an overnight success’. Thinking about ‘life sabbaticals’ and

Emma Gannon

’s ‘year of nothing’, I wondered if a decade being self-employed meant I was entitled to long service leave off from myself.

Mostly what I feel at the moment is a sort of calm confidence in finally being mid-career rather than emerging. When I look around at the challenges facing the publishing industry, and cost-of-living crises, and AI taking a lot of entry-level copy jobs, I just get this huge rush of gratitude that I’ve made it through the super tough trenches of the early years. Someone once told Annabel Crabb (and it’s career advice that she now passes on) that ‘the hardest day’ of your working life as a journalist is your first day. And your second-hardest day is the second day. No contacts, no reputation, nothing.

Other kinds of writing have felt like this to me as well. I don’t want to jinx myself and say everything is ‘easier’ now, but just know if you’re somewhere earlier along the ladder than I am now: stick with it. If you made it through the hardest, and the second-hardest, you can handle the third-hardest. And then you’ll get to ten years and five books and look around, blinking, feeling very glad you didn’t quit all those times you could have.

Best wishes and happy reading,

Bri

Spoiler Alert

Holy shit Spoiler Alert last week was so much fun. I can’t believe we all threw that book across the room at the exact same chapter! I fucking LOVE doing these livestreams! One Five Star Nerd, Sarah, sent me this DM afterwards:

It was my first time listening to/watching Spoiler Alert tonight and following on from the previous feedback I’d given, I wanted to let you know how much I loved it. I think there’s merit in the fact it’s so broad in it’s approach. Not quite a podcast, not quite a book club, not a newsletter, but built from one. It is its own delightfully in-between creature. I think to not be able to label or categorise something neatly is quite a fresh approach in this branded world of marketing funnels, and really quite a flex. Also, I could listen to you talk about books and writing for hours. You’re so very good at it. Such a talent for explanation, interpretation and synthesis. Never doubt that skill.

The next Spoiler Alert livestream is going to happen on Wednesday 26 March. Our two books are Half Truth by Nadia Mahjouri (chosen by me) and Down the Drain by Julia Fox (chosen by the Five Star Nerds).

You can watch previous Spoiler Alerts here. If you’ve got a book you think would make for excellent conversation then drop it in the chat and if you’ve got opinions on these books send me a voice memo here so I can play it and we can all respond and discuss.

Giveaway

The winner of the last giveaway, a copy of Half Truth by Nadia Mahjouri, is #35 out of 69. I’ve emailed you, Carissa Gadil!

This week’s giveaway is out from behind the paywall because it’s extra special and I want maximum eyeballs on it. Lori and the amazing team at Taste Tours have been copping a lot of Islamophobic hate in the leadup to their delicious and fantastic Ramadan tours.

I did my first Taste Tour back in 2021—Taste of Afghanistan and Syria—and have been raving about it ever since. My guide, Sahar, was such a delight and wealth of knowledge and had an infectious generosity of spirit. Taste Tours train and employ refugees, migrants, and local youth, and they’re Sydney’s only cultural food tours run by a social enterprise. Read about all their different tour options here.

This Ramadan, they’re inviting Sydneysiders and visitors to experience the Lakemba Night Markets in a way you never could on your own—with a knowledgeable Muslim guide. Running Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays in March, the exclusive ‘Taste of Ramadan’ tour provides an insider’s guide into the traditions, history, and incredible food of Ramadan in an unforgettable 2.5-hour immersive experience, starting from sundown. There’s an option for vegetarians, too. I’m going in mid-March. :)

The giveaway is for a double pass to any Taste Tour but I strongly recommend you take up the special Ramadan option. Enter with your name and email address here and I’ll draw the winner at random next week.

Good News

1. Large law firm Slater & Gordon have been in the news this week for a colossal coup: a rogue (ex?) employee wrote an email outlining various complaints and allegations made against senior staff, attached a document listing the 906 employees’ salaries, and then they smashed that BCC button. The Fin Review report that ‘external human resources experts would be called in to talk to staff upset about their relative pay level now that the firm’s entire payroll had been exposed’. Enforced pay transparency is radical solidarity. I’ve got popcorn watching this shitshow unfold.

2. Trump campaigned hard on getting rid of DEI policies, but Apple’s shareholders just voted against ending those initiatives. As the Guardian report, Google did what Trump told them to and scrapped theirs. Very large dominoes are falling. I often lump all the giant tech companies together, but it has really surprised me to see Apple draw a line in the sand on this. And because we celebrate the wins here, I did appreciate this Sydney Morning Herald piece about which of Trump’s core messages have and haven’t struck Australians. Many of these results are closer than we’d like, and I don’t know how the hell so many people can be ‘undecided’ on some of these issues, but it’s not as grim as it could have been. It’s not enough to win an Australian election copy-pasting the Trump policy approach:

   

3. Norway is on track to become the first country in the world to effectively remove gasoline and diesel cars from its new car market. According to CNBC, electric vehicles represented less than 1% of total auto sales in 2010, and as of last year they’d rocketed up to 88.9%. The first few weeks of 2025 had them up over 95%. And this is despite Norway having massive oil and gas reserves. Norway’s Deputy Transport Minister said long-term and consistent policies designed to support the uptake of EVs—rather than imposing measures to ban the use of internal combustion engine vehicles—had been pivotal to the country’s transition. They’re making plans to have a party when they hit 100%. Can you imagine?

Bad News

1. What a contrast! Since Elon Musk outed himself as a deranged juvenile delinquent, people have started ditching their Teslas. Who saw that coming? That all the progressive people with university degrees would be embarrassed to be seen driving a DOGE-affiliated automobile? Sales have almost halved in Europe and here in Australia a law firm has just filed a class action against Tesla over ‘instances of “phantom braking”, in which the car dramatically decelerates as though in an emergency when no danger is present.’ As The Age report, ‘Tesla sold more than 100,000 vehicles direct to Australians between 2021 and 2024 inclusive’ and are ‘the most popular plug-in battery-powered cars in Australia’. It still blows my mind how far right he’s marched in the last five years.

2. Remember that piece I wrote for the ABC’s longreads section last year, about school students creating and sharing deepfakes of their peers and teachers? Well here we go again. This time it’s at Gladstone Park Secondary College in Victoria, but as I wrote, I have absolutely no doubt the stories that actually get reported are just the tip of the iceberg. According to the ABC, child abuse detectives said as many as 60 female students could be affected. Two students have been suspended but police haven’t spoken to them yet and ‘more may be involved’. Please, talk to your young people about this! Us oldies need to collectively yank our heads out of the sand on this!

   

3. 500+ days after 7 October 2023 and the arts scene in Australia is still an imploding mess unable to deal with the Israel issue. Just this week, the Chair of the Sydney Writers Festival Kathy Shand announced her departure with a statement that ‘freedom of expression cannot and should not be used as a justification to accept language and conversations that compromise the festival.’ And clearly no lessons were learned from the 2020 incident with artist Casey Jenkins in which Creative Australia rescinded her $25,000 grant and ended up having to apologise and pay way more than that in a settlement. The ongoing saga with Khaled Sabsabi is an internationally embarrassing disgrace. As Louise Adler writes in this excellent piece today, ‘This most recent controversy—only the latest in a long series of pre-emptive self-censoring gestures by Australian arts organisations—suggests the direct threat facing the arts is from within.’

Good Reviews

1. Does anyone here remember that beautiful little periodical, The Happy Reader? Penguin published it for a while. Well, the man who ran it,

   Seb Emina
   , has a Substack called
   Read Me
   and in a recent edition he ‘invented some words that are a bit like “vegetarian”, but for the increasingly urgent activity of setting limits on what we consume online’. It’s a delightful read. My favourite is ALGNOSTIC: Avoids anything that’s been pre-curated by an algorithm, especially feed-based social media. Often likes to browse in the old way, by actively checking newspaper home pages or the blogs of favourite florists. May also eschew stuff like Google search results and the Netflix homepage, depending on severity of creed.

   Read Me #12: Inside Out

2. A couple of weeks ago in the new release roundup I mentioned I was 60 pages into The Mark by Fríða Ísberg (translated by Larissa Kyzer). Well, it got even better. The premise is that in Iceland in the near future, citizens are about to have a referendum about making the controversial ‘Empathy Test’ mandatory. It measures an individual’s capacity for compassion and identifies anti-social behaviour. Geographic lines are drawn. Families break apart. There’s a specific way this book captures the internal monologue of the disenfranchised young male that is very, very well done. It shows the inner workings of the well-intentioned fascists without feeling like a soapbox or mere thought experiment. And it grapples with how each of us has baggage and trauma that we can’t help but reach for when we form opinions about public policy. I can’t take credit for this part from the blurb, but it really nails it: ‘do we want to live in a world defined by our faith in each other, or by our fear of the future?’

   

3. A question I often get asked is what my ‘guilty pleasures’ are. I don’t really believe in the concept, but to have an answer, I say two things: judging weddings, and business books. (The Venn diagram of business and self-help-type books is often a circle if you’re self-employed.) I read and listen to them for the same reason other people read horoscopes: an excuse to examine myself from new angles. Anyways, the Audible algorithm (lol) told me I might like Sahil Bloom’s book, The 5 Types of Wealth, so I typed his name into Spotify and found a two-hour-long interview with him about it. Well, I was not expecting him to be so candid about his low point, or to come to the realisation on-air that he needed to give his wife more credit for his new holistic worldview. There are parts that veer into Atomic Habits territory, but I appreciated how practical he was trying to be with giving advice that small steps in the right direction are always possible. Let me know if you’ve read 5 Types. I wonder if we get most of the highlights from this interview.

This Week’s Group Chat Hot Topic: I Need a Hero (Or At Least an AntiHero)

Note: For years now I’ve given away my weekly bad reviews, essays, rants, and gripes for free. The trouble is, News & Reviews is no longer a fun little sneaky thing. Substack won’t let me cull subscribers so we’ve hit 11,000 readers and that number keeps growing. I was also inspired by this recent interview in which Tina Brown says ‘you need to be really good to do the 800 word pieces.’ So! I’ve swapped the order and I’m putting the bad reviews/juicy stuff and the giveaways down below. I’m experimenting with what to call it but the vibe is definitely ‘group chat hot topic’. As always, if you’re high enthusiasm and low funds, just reply to an email and I’ll comp you for six months. :)

I spend a lot of time thinking about how books work. When I teach writing usually what I’m actually teaching is reading; tools that we can use to dissect and discuss how and why books are affecting us. Most of the time when I’m editing my books I am thinking about what I would and wouldn’t like to encounter as a reader. When do I like to be strung along? When does a premise feel like a gimmick? All sorts of questions I ask of the books I read each week are fertilising the soil of my writing mind.

But alas, in the last month I abandoned two ultra-popular, critically-acclaimed works of fiction and I need your help figuring out why. I come to you this week hoping you can teach me.