Alice B. Toklas and her partner, the influential modernist writer Gertrude Stein, hosted a celebrated Paris salon. Toklas would go on to write an unusual bestseller.
Conservative critics argue the ‘social responsibility’ of business lies in increasing profits. But values have always been tied up with money-making, from the welfare state to colonialism.
Meta’s announcement it will stop paying for news poses a threat. High-quality news is expensive, but important. Do we need economic measures that somehow get the public to pay for it?
Writers festivals navigate the fraught frontier between social media’s echo chambers of outrage and the civilised public debate of the public square. What’s the way forward in this heated atmosphere?
Georgia Blain’s final, posthumous collection offers clear-eyed, calm compassion – and a capacity to live with, and alongside, damage, trauma and unspeakable loss, and a way of staying human.
A psychology professor debunks Rhonda Byrne’s world-bestselling book and film – and her theory of personal success through a magical connection with the universe.
The new TV series, Feud: Capote vs the Swans tells the story behind Answered Prayers, the never-finished gossip novel that made its author a social pariah. But what was in the book – and was it any good?
At 27, Robyn Davidson trekked through the Australian outback with four camels and a dog. In her long-awaited memoir we come closer to knowing why she made this journey.
There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift’s Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together. There’s no dumbing-down, and no need for reductive assertions about who is “better”.
Technically, ChatGPT can do (some of) the work of a human editor. But an experiment comparing three separate human edits of a literary short story to edits by ChatGPT exposes AI’s serious limitations.
Many argue Samuel Griffith, twice Queensland premier and our first chief justice, is guilty of colonial war crimes. Raymond Evans searched for the evidence to nail him but found a different story.
An innovative project pairs young Palestinian writers with overseas mentors. Even now, writers in Gaza are continuing to tell their stories, despite their very real fear that they might die.
From Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop, to The Door-to-Door Bookstore, a variety of new novels present bookselling as a source of solace, meaning and escape. What’s going on here?
Zora Simic has never been married, nor wanted to. She assesses two new books about feminism and marriage – Clementine Ford’s polemic against it and Rachael Lennon’s history of its reformation.
Two new memoirs make blind writer Amanda Tink ‘very proud’ of her community – and share the stories of blind writers, performers, teachers, activists and inventors.
Establishing the facts – and disentangling fact from legend – is not always straightforward when it comes to biography. Frank Moorhouse’s biographer unpacks his process.
Jem Bendell encourages us to think about societal collapse in ways that are ‘profound and startlingly original’, with the potential to birth whole new social movements, says Tom Doig.
Australians could once claim compensation for injuries arising from a broken engagement. Today, the responsibility for romantic injury has been individualised and feminised, its pain trivialised.