Claudia Rankine, winner of the Forward Prize, has provoked discussions about poetry and race in the US. Why are these conversations not happening in the UK?
Sahota’s Booker shortlisted novel is acutely intelligent and very of the moment. It may well take the prize.
Magda Szubanski in one of her most famous roles - Sharon Strzelecki - in Kath and Kim, with actors Gina Riley, Peter Rowsthorn, Glenn Robbins and Jane Turner.
Paul Jeffers/AAP
Magda Szubanski’s engaging debut memoir, Reckoning, is an exercise in precisely that: reconciling the past. It is also a celebration of the life and career of one of our greatest comedians.
Taken from Daniël Heinsius’ Emblemata Amatoria (1601)
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While legal precedent makes banning books difficult, it still happens.
Since 1982, over 11,000 books have been challenged by individuals seeking to have them banned from schools or libraries.
'Book' via www.shutterstock.com
Anne Summers’ ambitious 1975 book reframed Australian history by placing women at its centre. It was a book of its time. But its groundbreaking approach ensures it is also a book for today.
Chief Executive and Publisher of Melbourne University Press, Louise Adler, will chair the new book council.
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The Book Council of Australia began to take shape last week when MUP director Louise Adler was announced as its chair. But what is its purpose, and how will it embrace the industry’s new voices?
In the same week that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon of Aylan al-Kurdi made the headlines, I’m reminded of another controversial image. In 1840, J M W Turner exhibited what would become one of his most famous…
The Power of the Dog and The Cartel reflect real-life concerns in Mexico’s drug war.
AAP Image/NEWZULU/Irving Cabrera Torres
Recent events in Mexico’s drug war could easily have been depicted in Don Winslow’s twin novels The Power of the Dog and The Cartel. Drug war capitalism is, at times, stranger than fiction.
The book prize is the publisher’s answer to the persistent grumble that fiction is in its death throes; an attempt to combat the perceived threat of the digital.