Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first in the phenomenally successful series, turns 20 this month. Despite criticism of their status as ‘literature’, the books remain a magical experience for children.
Many literary questions about smell are quite philosophical. Why do humans get pleasure from perfumes? Do rich bodies smell differently from poor ones?
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Smell is the Cinderella of the senses in Anglophone literature, but James Joyce wrote an olfactory revolution. His treatment of the science of smell was astonishingly prescient.
The late Gordon Burn’s prophetic writing predicted our obsession with celebrity and the media.
Bob Dylan pictured in 2012: his long synopses of a seemingly random list of books made up the bulk of this week’s Nobel Prize speech.
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe, is the latest manifestation of our centuries old fascination with Egypt. But beneath this obsession is a darker story of looting and destruction.
Weather forecasting stopped looking for patterns in the past, and started using numbers to look solidly at the future.
A message ploughed in the land calls on the federal government to help drought-affected farmers near the wheatbelt town of Kondinin in 2001.
Liza Kappelle/AAP
In two 30-year periods, an area in WA roughly the size of England was stripped of native vegetation for farming. It has produced some of our finest writers, from A.B. Facey to Dorothy Hewitt to Jack Davis.
Do the rules of success apply equally to all women?
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‘Women Who Work’ attempts to present itself as an apolitical work. But no narratives ever are – and it’s especially the case for those that anxiously seek to appear that way.
William Faulkner’s typewriter in Mississippi. The writing life may sound idyllic, but it was often a furious battle to make ends meet.
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Over 40 years, author Helen Garner has delighted, infuriated, confused and charmed readers. A new account of her writing life is informative but avoids delving into the trickier aspects of her work.
James Patterson – one of the world’s bestselling authors – may not principally be a writer.
Aaron Douglas. "Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction." Oil on canvas, 1934. The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division.
Many associate post-World War I culture with Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s Lost Generation. But for black artists, writers and thinkers, the war changed the way they saw their past and their future.
Children’s books were historically moralising and instructive. What’s changed?
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