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Every week we identify the best-written works of fiction, speculative fiction, or nonfiction from recent releases and shortlists for major prizes. We also publish articles by their authors on prose technique and AI writing, and for paid subscribers the best-written book of the month.
Information about submitting to Auraist is here. Our standards are as high as for our other picks, but if we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style.
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The best-written shortlisted books»
The winner of the Miles Franklin Award will be announced on the 5th of August.
The shortlist:
Discipline — Randa Abdel-Fattah
First Name Second Name — Steve MinOn
My Heart at Evening — Konrad Muller
Fierceland — Omar Musa
Little World — Josephine Rowe
You Must Remember This — Sean Wilson
The saint is nameless when she comes to Orrin Bird. By horse float, of all things. Though he cannot say what other mode of transport might have been more appropriate, given circumstances. She could hardly have come by rail, accompanied or otherwise. He supposes she might have come by hearse. Though hearses are scarce enough out here, and to receive a casket, a box of any kind from such a vehicle, would have brought attention, prying in the guise of condolences. In fact, condolences are not unwarranted—his old friend, Kaspar Isaksen, is gone, has finally drunk himself to death, and left Orrin custodian to a saint.
Bequest is how she is written up, by Isaksen’s solicitor, in the letter that preceded her arrival. The saint had been nameless, even when she’d come to Kaspar. Removed from whatever place she had been kept and cared for, for however long, and where she was presumably entreated by name, one that was lost now. How had she come to Kaspar, on that speck of phosphate in the Central Pacific? Likely no respectable avenue.
Our pick is here (US)»
UK/Ireland»
Late-stage denial is seldom complete, seldom total. It can’t tell a late-stage alcoholic they’ve no problem whatsoever with drink, or tell a late-stage addict they’ve no problem with porn or hookers, because such lies are no longer believable. What it does instead, then, is downplay the seriousness of the problem. Rather than non-existent, the porn or hookers problem becomes No big deal.
And as with resentments, MAGA, Take Back Control, brainwashing of terrorists, and any other marketing campaign that sells you lies, the key to the con is repetition. You must keep telling yourself it’s no big deal, ideally with a subtly less serious tone each time, a 4channish tone perhaps, loosen up FFS, so that by the tenth repetition No big deal has become, consciously or not, One more time, then and you find you’re on the brothel’s doorstep.
Read more here»
Our archive has over sixty author articles on prose style and AI writing, hundreds of picks from