Max Easton

Max Easton is a writer from Sydney. He is the creator of Barely Human, a zine and podcast series exploring underground music’s ties to counterculture and subculture. He is the author of two novels: The Magpie Wing (longlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award) and its follow-up, Paradise Estate, published in 2023. ‘Tourist Trap’ contains characters from his first two novels, and acts as an accompanying tale for his novel Now, Autonomy (Giramondo, 2026).

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Each mouthful was the same, another northern Italian dish informed by butter, challenging her imagined ideas of this country. She hadn’t felt anything in Milan yet that she hadn’t already felt at home. But when she got to the bottom of the plate, she had the thought that to be a tourist is to be a spectator, and that to be a spectator means making a wordless oath to passive observation. Which was a role that Helen had never respected in anyone she’d ever known.