shutterstock.
Shutterstock
Through subtle parallels to our own lives and choices, literature can help us make sense of political upheavals.
Helen Garner: her work frequently polarises readers.
Nicholas Purcell Studio
Over 40 years, author Helen Garner has delighted, infuriated, confused and charmed readers. A new account of her writing life is informative but avoids delving into the trickier aspects of her work.
Claire Nally
The poet’s letters to her former therapist will be published later this year. How far is this an invasion of her privacy?
Vladimir and Vera Nabokov in 1969.
Giuseppe Pino, Wikimedia Commons
From Tolstoy to Mark Twain, the most famous writers owe many words of thanks to their long-suffering wives.
Shutterstock
James Patterson – one of the world’s bestselling authors – may not principally be a writer.
Aaron Douglas. "Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction." Oil on canvas, 1934. The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division.
Many associate post-World War I culture with Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s Lost Generation. But for black artists, writers and thinkers, the war changed the way they saw their past and their future.
Children’s books were historically moralising and instructive. What’s changed?
Hillarie/Flickr
Children’s literature may be a modern genre, but there is a long history of writing for children with some surprisingly unchanging elements.
Johanna Altmann / Shutterstock.com
Whether the ubiquity of fiction has devalued truth or enhanced morality has been in doubt for over 2,000 years.
A student performs at the 2013 Louder Than a Bomb slam poetry competition in Boston, Massachusetts.
John Tammaro / flickr
Poetry has been a part of teaching and learning for hundreds of years. But how has poetry education changed? And how are young voices using poetry to express themselves today?
Twain was an opinionated, prolific commentator on the personalities and political issues of his day.
Terry Ballard/flickr
He probably would have been amused by – and maybe even befriended – Trump the entertainer. Trump the president? Not so much.
Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, Trouvelot figure. Photograph of electrical effluvia around a coin 1888–89.
© Musée des arts et métiers-Cnam, Paris. Photo Michèle Fava
The way writers drew on electricity to weave their stories tells us much about the history of electricity itself.
Milo Yiannopoulos addressing the media this week.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Independent booksellers are increasingly seeing their role as, necessarily, an active, educative, political one.
Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility: a competent moral agent drawing only on her intelligence and experience.
Columbia Pictures Corporation
This year is the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death and her celebrity continues to grow. But relegating Austen’s work to plots about ‘whether the heroine gets her man’ belittles her achievement.
A painting of Alex played by Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange.
Alex DeLarge/Flickr
On the centenary of Anthony Burgess’s birth – A Clockwork Orange had a profound influence on the cultural and political landscape.
Shutterstock
Alternative facts owe more to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s 1984.
The stuff of legend.
Shutterstock
Norse mythology is having a moment as a leading author re-tells the tales for a new generation.
The ‘sky in silver lace’ is Vivienne’s euphemistic metaphor for the encroaching hard times.
Shutterstock
The Melling sisters — like Alcott’s March sisters and Austen’s Bennetts — are four girls who become women during the course of Robin Klein’s trilogy of novels. The Sky in Silver Lace is the most bittersweet of the three.
The lychgate of the Camel’s Back Road Cemetery.
Anne_nz/Flickr
Are the the hauntings at Landour just practical fictions amidst the solitude of the hills?
Universal
Though sharing with Fifty Shades the overall themes of sexual domination and submission, Story of O remains a work of substantial literary merit.
pavdw/flickr
In the face of planetary problems such as climate change, does national citizenship lose its meaning?