Young adult post-disaster fiction is more concerned with how we survive than understanding the causes of disaster. We can read it to explore our fears, responses and our capacity to adapt.
While the man the world knows as ‘Papa’ balanced the demands of parenting with his work, his letters and fiction offer a window into the depth of his paternal feeling.
Our relationships with characters from books and screen – called parasocial relationships – serve many of the same functions as our friendships with real people, minus the infection risks.
A new book, which weaves fiction into the origin story of the Oxford English Dictionary, was declared a hit even before its release. Readers will judge whether it lives up to the hype.
Science fiction writing often serves as a thought experiment that explores shared and hidden beliefs whose material and political reverberations lie further in the future.
Status anxiety and conspicuous consumption generate a dazzling, often surreal poetry in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But Gatsby’s rise and fall exposes deep fissures underlying the American Dream.
It’s one of the largest prison escapes in world history and it’s through fiction we can understand the tragedy, from both an Australian and Japanese perspective.