Fire Country

Delving deep into the Australian landscape and the environmental challenges we face, Fire Country is a powerful account from Indigenous land management expert Victor Steffensen on how the revival of cultural burning practices, and improved 'reading' of country, could help to restore our land. From a young age, Victor has had a passion for traditional cultural and ecological knowledge. This was further developed after meeting two Elders, who were to become his mentors and teach him the importance of cultural burning. Developed over many generations, this knowledge shows clearly that Australia actually needs fire. Moreover, fire is an important part of a holistic approach to the environment, and when burning is done in a carefully considered manner, this ensures proper land care and healing. Victor's story is unassuming and honest, while demonstrating the incredibly sophisticated and complex cultural knowledge that has been passed down to him, which he wants to share with others. As global warming sees more parts of our planet burning, this book emphasises the value of Indigenous knowledge systems. There is much evidence that, if adopted, it could greatly benefit the land here in Australia and around the world.

In her third collection, Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka dives into the implications of being parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism. With a voice bound and wrestled apart by multiple histories, Fire Is Not a Country claims the spaces between here and there, then and now, us and not us. As she builds a lyric portrait of her own family, Oka interrogates how migration, economic exploitation, patriarchal violence, and a legacy of political repression shape the beauties and limitations of familial love and obligation. Woven throughout are speculative experiments that intervene in the popular apocalyptic narratives of our time with the wit of an unassimilable other. Oka’s speakers mourn, labor, argue, digress, avenge, and fail, but they do not retreat. Born of conflicts public and private, this collection is for anyone interested in what it means to engage the multitudes within ourselves.

Looking After Country with Fire is a picture book for 5- to 10-year-olds that demonstrates respect for Indigenous knowledge, following the success of Victor Steffensen's bestselling adult book Fire Country. Mother Nature has a language. If we listen, and read the signs in the land, we can understand it. For thousands of years, First Nations people have listened and responded to the land and made friends with fire, using this knowledge to encourage plants and seeds to flourish, and creating beautiful places for both animals and people to live. Join Uncle Kuu as he takes us out on Country and explains cultural burning. Featuring stunning artwork by Sandra Steffensen, this is a powerful and timely story of understanding Australia's ecosystems through Indigenous fire management, and a respectful way forward for future generations to help manage our landscapes. At the back of the book, you will also find lyrics to a song written by author Victor Steffensen with the same title, 'Looking After Country with Fire'.

"Exciting Post-Apocalyptic Tale...world building is rich, detailed, and believable. Readers who enjoyed Blood Red Road by Moira Young will absolutely love this book!"- Mike Mullin, bestselling author of ASHFALL"Fire Country is a fast, fierce read. You will root for the protagonist, Siena, and her story will rake you across the coals. I will be keeping an eye on David Estes. You should too!" -Emmy Laybourne, bestselling author of MONUMENT 14"Strong world building and vivid characters make Fire Country stand out from other post-apocalyptic YA novels. Young Siena is spunky and believable, and readers will pull for her to escape the clutches of her father and the dystopian society in which she lives."- Rysa Walker, bestselling author of TIMEBOUNDIn a changed world where the sky bleeds red, winter is hotter than hell and full of sandstorms, and summer's even hotter with raging fires that roam the desert-like country, the Heaters manage to survive, barely. Due to toxic air, life expectancies are so low the only way the tribe can survive is by forcing women to procreate when they turn sixteen and every three years thereafter. It is their duty as Bearers.Fifteen-year-old Siena is a Youngling, soon to be a Bearer, when she starts hearing rumors of another tribe of all women, called the Wild Ones. They are known to kidnap Youngling girls before the Call, the ceremony in which Bearers are given a husband with whom to bear children with. As the desert sands run out on her life's hourglass, Siena must uncover the truth about the Wild Ones while untangling the web of lies and deceit her father has masterfully spun.

What do you need to know to prosper as a people for at least 65,000 years? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians. For millennia, Indigenous Australians harvested this continent in ways that can offer contemporary environmental and economic solutions. Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe demonstrate how Aboriginal people cultivated the land through manipulation of water flows, vegetation and firestick practice. Not solely hunters and gatherers, the First Australians also farmed and stored food. They employed complex seasonal fire programs that protected Country and animals alike. In doing so, they avoided the killer fires that we fear today. Country: Future Fire, Future Farming highlights the consequences of ignoring this deep history and living in unsustainable ways. It details the remarkable agricultural and land-care techniques of First Nations peoples and shows how such practices are needed now more than ever.

In 2001, Captain James "Yusuf" Yee was commissioned as one of the first Muslim chaplains in the United States Army. After the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, he became a frequent government spokesman, helping to educate soldiers about Islam and build understanding throughout the military. Subsequently, Chaplain Yee was selected to serve as the Muslim Chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, where nearly 700 detainees captured in the war on terror were being held as "unlawful combatants." In September 2003, after serving at Guantanamo for ten months in a role that gave him unrestricted access to the detainees--and after receiving numerous awards for his service there--Chaplain Yee was secretly arrested on his way to meet his wife and daughter for a routine two-week leave. He was locked away in a navy prison, subject to much of the same treatment that had been imposed on the Guantanamo detainees. Wrongfully accused of spying, and aiding the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Yee spent 76 excruciating days in solitary confinement and was threatened with the death penalty. After the U.S. government determined it had made a grave mistake in its original allegations, it vindictively charged him with adultery and computer pornography. In the end all criminal charges were dropped and Chaplain Yee's record wiped clean. But his reputation was tarnished, and what has been a promising military career was left in ruins. Depicting a journey of faith and service, Chaplain Yee's For God and Country is the story of a pioneering officer in the U.S. Army, who became a victim of the post-September 11 paranoia that gripped a starkly fearful nation. And it poses a fundamental question: If our country cannot be loyal to even the most patriotic Americans, can it remain loyal to itself?

“The 1001 Nights of its time – rooms opening into rooms, stories into stories, in the same literary mansion as Calvino, Burroughs, and other metafabulist satirists: horrifying, funny, written in a language all its own.” - Margaret Atwood “Ghalib Islam has written one of the buzziest novels of the season.” - Toronto Life The universe is shaking as Hedayat, the "glossolalist" narrator of Fire in the Unnameable Country is born on a flying carpet in the skies above an obscure land whose leader has manufactured the ability to hear every unspoken utterance of the nation. He records the contents of his citizens' minds onto tape reels for archival storage. Later in Hedayat's young life, as the unnameable country collapses into disarray around him, he begins an epistle, wherein, interspersed with accounts of contemporary terrorist attacks and the outbreak of a mysterious viral epidemic, he invokes the memories of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents to revisit the troubled country's history and expose the roots of its crisis. Hedayat's dark world is entirely foreign but oddly familiar, echoing the banality of our daily diversions and adding a terrifying twist. The Mirror, a gruesome, never-ending reality show, turns the city of La Maga into a permanent Hollywood-style film set where people gamble body parts and live in fear of the Black Organs, the paramilitary manifestation of the eviscerators that threaten to infect the nation. Islam's vibrant, ingenious construction sends the plot twisting down rabbit holes and caterwauling through secret doorways to emerge anywhere from a domestic living room to a bomb technician's workshop to the deep recesses of the state's repressive political apparatus. An utterly remarkable debut, filled with original characters caught up in wonderfully imaginative circumstances and rendered in uniquely inventive language, Fire in the Unnameable Country is a book like no other.

The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.