In The Best Australian Essays 2013, Robert Manne draws out this year's most distinctive voices. This superb collection encompasses the personal, with Robert Dessaix's distant summer of love and touch-typing and Helen Garner's reaction to the death of Jill Meagher; and the political, with Chloe Hooper and Pamela Williams reflecting on the last days in office of Gillard and Rudd, while Christos Tsiolkas tells us why we hate asylum seekers and Julian Assange warns of the internet's threat to civilisation. In the spaces between, Richard Flanagan and Murray Bail peer into the world of art, David Free savours the legacy of Monty Python, Julian Meyrick remembers Margaret Thatcher, and Tim Flannery reveals the terrors of jellyfish. Kim Mahood The River Rozanna Lilley Bohemian Parents Hazel Dooney Broken Ali Alizadeh Teenage Torment Robert Dessaix A Crush Helen Garner Miniatures Kate Legge Two Worlds Collide Fran Cusworth Living with Dementia Karen Hitchcock Fat City Kate Forsyth Stuttering Sybille Smith Growing Up in Two Languages Murray Bail Lives of the Artists J.M.
Coetzee Gerald Murnane Richard Flanagan David Walsh and MONA Mark McKenna Sibelius Adrian Martin Citizens without a Past David Free Monty Python Anna Goldsworthy Vale Christopher Pearson Guy Rundle Soho Julian Meyrick Thatcherism Chloe Hooper Julia Gillard Pamela Williams How the Rudd Campaign Unravelled Christos Tsiolkas Asylum Seekers Alice Pung Writing about Her Father Simon Leys Barthes in China Martin Krygier How To Deal with the Past Hugh White The Purpose of War Bill McKibben Australian Coal Tim Flannery Jellyfish Julian Assange A Call to Arms