Adrift in outer space, a motley crew of human-made objects tell their tales, making real history sweeter and stranger.

Starman, a lovelorn mannequin orbiting the Sun in his cherry-red car, pines for his creator. The first sculpture ever taken to the Moon is possessed by the spirit of Neil Armstrong. The International Space Station, awaiting deorbit and burial in a spacecraft cemetery beneath the ocean, farewells its last astronauts. A team of tamponauts sets off on a perilous mission to Mars inspired by the courage of their predecessors. The Voyager 1 space probe – carrying its precious Golden Record – is captured by Oortians near the edge of the solar system and drawn into their baroque, glimmering rituals.

By turns joyous and mournful, these object-astronauts are not high priests of the universe but something a little weirder. From their inverted perspectives, they observe humans both intimately and from a great distance, bearing witness to a civilisation unable to live up to its own ideals. And yet each still finds in our planet – in their humans – something worthy of love.

Hamish Hamilton, 2024

As with her most recent publications, Wrong Norma is a facsimile edition of the original hand-designed book, annotated and corrected by the author.

Anne Carson is probably our most celebrated living poet, winner of countless awards and routinely tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this-

‘Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word “idea”, the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them “wrong”.’

Jonathan Cape, 2024

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, says Le, a Vietnamese refugee to Australia, is ‘the book I need to write. The book I’ve been writing my whole life’. This book-length poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity, embedded with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions – of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence, for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this, of language itself.

Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilising energy between the personal and political, honouring every convention of diasporic literature – in a virtuosic array of forms and registers – before shattering the form itself. Like The Boat, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem conjures its own terms of engagement, escapes our traps, slips our certainties. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

Scribner Australia, 2024

Hokusai’s Fuji showcases the Japanese artist’s near-obsession with Mount Fuji. This new collection includes all the illustrations from Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and the three volumes of his subsequent One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, as well as many of his earlier and later renditions of the mountain.

In Buddhist and Daoist tradition, Mount Fuji was thought to hold the secret to eternal life. For Hokusai, Fuji came to represent his hankering after artistic immortality. It is therefore fitting that this collection is a stunning celebration of his oeuvre and the continuing significance of this incredible ukiyo-e artist.

Thames & Hudson, 2024

Following the global hits Something Wicked from Japan and Once More Unto the Breach comes the third title in the Ukiyo-e Masterpieces Series! This time, read and understand the world of ukiyo-e from the perspective of animals. In ukiyo-e, many animals that interact with humans are depicted. Beginning with cats, dogs, and rabbits, we move on to ferocious tigers and elephants, imported camels, peacocks, and parrots, and even to fantastical beasts. This book introduces numerous charming works through interesting chapters such as “Pets of the Edo Period,” “Working Animals,” “Rare Animals” and more. This is a bilingual book with text both in Japanese and English.

Pie Books, 2023