Dante’s Inferno – Joseph Anton Koch, detail from Cassa Massimo fresco (c.1825).
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Let Us Descend is concerned with the neglected lives of the the poor, the despised, the dark, those barely scraping a living, but cannot capture the collective experience of slavery.
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Despite its neglect, Australian horror is alive and kicking – and crawling on the floor, frightfully howling at the moon, and swimming with creepy serpents in a lake.
Celebrate Nos Galan Gaeaf with some Welsh gothic fiction.
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These five works of Welsh gothic literature will not only help you explore Wales through the macabre but are likely to give you a good scare too.
Baucau, Timor-Leste.
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In The Idealist, the machinations of the Australian government become a sinister backdrop to what seems to be a story of liberation.
Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939).
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It is how the detectives respond to superstition which cements the connections between the Conan Doyle and Christie stories
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Paradise Estate is a good-humoured depiction of the travails of share-house living, with a political edge.
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From haunted houses to villainous vampires, these are the spooky reads our experts just can’t forget.
A Weeping Woman– Rembrandt (c.1645)
Public domain
The latest books by Gretchen Shirm and Briony Doyle are preoccupied with the aftermaths of recent deaths.
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In Kairos, a relationship between a young woman and an older married man captures the difficulties and ambivalences of German reunification.
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Perception and reality collide when a mother and daughter are compelled to live in the shadow of a monstrous artist.
Storytelling can be an effective way to impart lessons in science.
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Poetry and prose are prominent features in this course about how climate change is affecting the world.
Fractals emerge on Day 4 of Suri’s playful Genesis-inspired narrative about math’s role in creation.
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A book-length thought experiment uses math to investigate some of life’s big questions.
Polites traces Honour’s journey from her village scented with pine trees to suburban Australia.
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God Forgets About the Poor is one part family saga, one part autofiction, one part Proustian journey through memory.
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A new book designed to interest potential and beginning readers also offers plenty of new ideas to interest well-versed Murnanians.
Allegory of the Immaculate Conception – Gregorio Vasquez de Arce y Ceballos (1638–1711).
Public domain
Some fairy tales tell the brutal truth, others offer the hope of a happy ending. Immaculate raises the possibility of both.
Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot.
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Agatha Christie never explicitly said so, but many of her Belgian detective’s character traits could be interpreted as being autistic.
Celia Rabess, author of Everything’s Fine (photo by Amyrose Stephen-Rabess). Backdrop by David Boozer/Pexels.
Cecilia Rabess’s controversial debut novel explores race, politics and love in the time of Trump.
Harvill Secker/The Feminist Press at CUNY/Amazon Crossing/Dedalus Ltd/Deep Vellum Publishing/Other Press
Mysteries from China, short stories from the Balkans, a French-Morrocan autobiography and more.
Two people walking through the destruction from the August 6 detonation of the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima, Japan, September 8, 1945.
US Air Force/AP
A classic of modern Japanese literature, Black Rain has come to exemplify ‘atomic bomb literature’.
Dolly Maunder.
Text Publishing
Family memoir and reimagined history dovetail beautifully in Kate Grenville’s latest novel.