We need to consider what balance we want to achieve between the heritage and contemporary arts.
AAP Image/Julian Smith. Artists of the Australian Ballet rehearse for the The Dream.
Given the pressure being applied to the majority of people working in the arts sector, we would be foolish not to consider the roles and inherited rights of Australia’s major performing companies.
The release of the long list has opened the gates to the annual torrents of literary hobnobbing.
After World War II, Dr Seuss dedicated himself to creating art that would speak to a sense of fairness and justice that he believed only children possessed.
Steve James/flickr
The reader who loves literature of the past seeks to forge intimate connections with those who are no longer alive. In reading, we feel ourselves able to get up close and personal with a dead author.
Paperback and hardback editions of The Book of Days, an illustrated anthology edited, designed and produced in three weeks.
Zoë Sadokierski
As well as a souvenir of the 2015 Sydney Writers’ Festival this anthology is a compelling argument for the future of books in print. Book objects are talismans as much as vessels for the content they carry.
People were talking about heatwaves long before the data proved they were on the rise.
Powerhouse Museum/Wikimedia Commons
Will J Grant, Australian National University and Erin Walsh, Australian National University
The history of climate change is writ large in literature - and not just scientific journals. An analysis of Google’s vast library shows a rise in use of phrases such as “unusual weather” and “heat wave”.
Deciding on the winner of a literary award is, in the end, a highly subjective process.
RebeccaVC1
Joan London’s The Golden Age won the Kibble Award last week, having been shortlisted – but unsuccessful – in several high-profile prizes previously. Deciding on winners is a highly subjective process.
EL Doctorow, pictured here in 2007, has died. His work in its entirety bespeaks a profound humanity.
Radim Beznoska/AAP
Over the course of almost six decades, Doctorow – who has died – wrote himself into the canon of American literature. He embodied the virtues of a classical storyteller.
Atticus is not who we thought he was – but maybe who we thought he was was wrong.
Paul Walsh
Atticus Finch, we learn in Go Set a Watchman, once attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, and welcomes pro-segregation speakers at local council meetings. But is he really so different to the man we know from To Kill a Mockingbird?
Making a splash in letters may be harder under changes to Australian arts funding.
Orange County Archives Follow
It’s hard to work out how funding for literature – if at all – fits into the draft guidelines of the new National Program for Excellence in the Arts. So what are the politics, and problems, at play?
Already having baby-naming regret? Don’t worry – look to the past for alternative role models.
Still of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Universal Pictures
Some parents have been horrified to discover that, in Harper Lee’s new book, Atticus Finch – long admired as a paragon of virtue – is a racist. Why? Because their kids are named after him. So, what now?
Mishani’s novels centre on rather ordinary Israelis, their ordinary lives and the tragedies that befall them.
Thomas Renken
Not every crime novel needs a Jason Bourne. Mishani eschews the obvious world of Mossad agents and terrorist plots you might expect in an Israeli crime novel – and the results are thrilling.
Dead brothers and grieving characters are everywhere in Salinger’s fiction.
Pawel Maryanov
Salinger is still known for the resonance his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, has with young readers, but at the core of his fiction sits a theme that is often overlooked – unresolved grief.
Talk of a possible third book to follow this week’s release of Go Set a Watchman suggests the ‘delicious mystery’ of Harper Lee will continue for years to come. So what basis is there for the rumours?
Coming to a lecture theatre near you.
EPA/Andy Rain
Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee, is one of the most anticipated follow-ups in history, to be published next week after a 55-year hiatus. So what does the opening chapter prime us to expect?
Many covers of Nabokov’s novel convey the false impression of Lolita as a young seductress.
Ivana Vasilj
The discrepancy between cover designs for Lolita – published 60 years ago – and the themes of the novel are stark. But that hasn’t stopped hundreds of designers trying to get it right.
Whatever name you give it, writing of this sort is increasingly becoming the prime location for imaginative representations of our culture’s deepest hopes and fears.