(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
 

Ann Skea reviews...
 

Depth of Field
by Kirsty Iltners

Tom seems like a nice bloke—mid-40s, living in a "battered" old house that creaks in the wind, working as a photographer with a young real estate agent whose name he can never remember ("Some kind of precious stone," she becomes "Ruby," "Sapphire," "Amethyst" "Diamond," as the novel progresses), and surviving on greasy take-aways. He shares sex with Freya, whom he has known for three years but who, like him, desires not to become involved. He thinks of her, sadly, as being "someone closer to being a stranger than a friend," because Adeline is constantly in his thoughts, and clearly something terrible has happened to part them, for which Tom blames himself.
 

The Beauties
by Lauren Chater

The room is crowded with petitioners. "Emilia is aware of the wall of bodies at her back, the hot breath of strangers on her neck," and some of the petitioners are "plagued by illnesses and deformities." The King does notice her but is called away before she can speak to him. So, for many days she returns, but the King is always busy elsewhere. Only by chance, at a rehearsal of Arabella's latest theatrical performance, does a real meeting take place; and, so, Emilia's dilemma begins. How can she avoid answering the King's question?
 

Mural
by Stephen Downes

After an account of unexpectedly meeting a childhood friend in a bushland reserve in the Melbourne suburbs, and listening to the friend's complaints about the way Methodism and his Methodist parents had ruined his life and led to his murdering his mum and dad, our narrator writes of his own experiences of Methodism, and of the mural behind the pulpit in the church he had to attend as a boy, and how it had terrified him.
 

Broadlands
by Matt Howard

Matt Howard is, as he said at a poetry reading, "just an amateur with a passion for nature." He lives and works close to the Norfolk Broads and has spent years exploring and getting to know the rich diversity of plants and animals in the meadows, reed-beds, and marshlands of the Broadlands. He believes there are many "modes" of being an ecology activist, and, for him, poetry is an important one. He wants to let us be there with him in the field so we feel nature and think about it—to put us into the conversation and provoke us.
 

The First Friend
by Malcolm Knox

Murtov is aware that AAA has a notebook in his pocket and records such things as Murtov's wristwatch ("banned after the October Revolution"), his awareness of Murtov's early life as a part of the imperialist power elite and a "non-toiler," and his "inherited blat" ("pull, patronage, privilege") as a friend Beria. Murtov suspects AAA of seeking favor with Natia: "AAA was hers. AAA was Post, AAA was multicultural, AAA was a pure Natia mole."
 

Glorious Exploits
by Ferdia Lennon

Lampo is a chatty young fellow and bit of a good-natured clown, inclined to make weak, foolish jokes at inappropriate moments. "Officially," he is "scouting for actors" for Gelon. He is uninterested in Euripides and is more occupied with the smell in the quarry, "something awful: thick and rotten," and in noting the terrible state of the prisoners. He imagines "the worst spots of Hades" might have "something similar," and he remembers the evening the Athenians surrendered and there was a debate "that went on for hours" with "Diocles pacing back and forth, roaring "Where do we put seven thousand of these bastards?" Nowhere in Sicily, never mind Syracuse, was there a prison big enough, but the steep-sided, rock-walled, easily guarded quarries were the obvious answer.
 

The Honeyeater
by Jessie Tu

Fay's mother is superstitious and very concerned about thieves. "Did you check your pockets?" she asks Fay in the Louvre. "You shouldn't look at your phone when you're standing alone! Someone might sneak up on you." She is especially superstitious about Fay's prospective visit to a translators' conference in Taiwan, something Fay badly wants for career reasons, but which her professor is strangely reluctant to approve. Taiwan for Fay's mother is "that ghost island," and the conference will be taking place in the especially dangerous "ghost month."
 

Gregory Stephenson reviews...
 

Fuzz Against Smut: The Saga of the Anti-Smut Brigade
Story by Angelo Pastormerlo & Derek Pell, with collages by Norman Conquest

Fuzz Against Smut is at once an homage to and a pastiche of Akbar del Piombo’s illustrious, hilarious Fuzz Against Junk. Like the original model on which it is patterned, Fuzz Against Smut consists of text and images, colliding and colluding with each other. As the story is set in late Victorian London, the prose is a deadpan burlesque of the sensationalism and perpetual moral panic characteristic of certain popular newspapers and periodicals of that era. (And, alas, of our own era, as well.)