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Articles on Books

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Why do dictatorships make such a compelling backdrop for crime fiction? Dean Ayres/Flickr

Why dictators and detectives are a good match in crime fiction

Dictators dislike detective novels. Both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany outlawed crime fiction in 1941. The crime novel, according to the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture, weakened the health of the…
Social reading in book clubs helps readers make sense of big ideas through personal experience. Susana Fernandez

Book Week is good for kids – and book clubs are great for adults

If my Facebook feed is anything to go by, last month parents scrabbled to make costumes of popular characters from children’s books. They were preparing for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s annual…
Shane Warne has lived his professional life in the public eye. Does this make it more difficult for a biographer to tell his story? AAP Image/Mal Fairclough

Biography in the age of celebrity: what’s left to reveal?

Virginia Woolf – so Hermione Lee writes in Virginia Woolf, her 1997 biography of the celebrated writer – thought it immensely difficult to ever know another person. Today the winner of the 2014 National…
Good reviewers don’t need editors to fight their battles. Luke Larsson

Self-defence for book reviewers

It is perfectly understandable for an editor to be protective of his own patch, but it is worrying when the editor of a national magazine, which claims to be the leading independent Australian literary…
Our book shelves would look very different. Sharon Drummond

Without World War I, what would literature look like today?

As we begin to commemorate the outbreak of World War I in earnest, just how central the “Great” war is to Britain’s conception of its history is ever more obvious. And this is also very true in terms of…
Mary’s poems give a unique insight into how the queen experienced her bloody, passionate and tragic life. Dave McLear

Mary, Queen of Scots was a poet – and you should know it

Think Mary, Queen of Scots and a few key facts probably come to mind: she was Catholic, she was imprisoned and she had her head chopped off. But a poet who offers insight into 16th-century women’s writing…
What can be read between the handwritten lines of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables manuscript? Bibliothèque nationale de France

Don’t be Misérables – it’s Hugo’s original manuscript

The handwritten manuscript of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables (1862) – from which the blockbuster stage show and numerous movies ultimately descend – has arrived at the State Library of Victoria (its…
Australian writing for young adults has moved on as has our thinking about what it means to be gay. Pat Reynolds

Gay? Jewish? Neither? A manual to help you challenge the rules

Young adult fiction and complex themes go hand in hand – not least in one of the most recent entries to this field. Melbourne-based writer Eli Glasman’s debut novel The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper…

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