Many harsh things are said in Summers’ book. It’s difficult to decide whether to praise its “breathtaking honesty” – as critics undoubtedly will – or draw back like a witness to some gruesome accident.
Children with access to books reach higher levels of education.
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Many Americans view the Amish as living simply and in touch with the land, but their views about the environment are complicated and not always ‘green.’
The Railway Depot furnace at Kaserne, Johannesburg in 1971. Banned and confiscated books and magazines were burnt weekly.
Wits Student
Girls are encouraged more often to read, despite performing better in reading assessments nationally and internationally. Here’s how parents and educators can help connect boys with books.
In her new book, Ford examines how boys are inducted into ‘toxic masculinity’ – and argues we need to raise boys better.
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Ford works toward dismantling the idea that feminism is harming men. Instead, she proposes that a patriarchal society can be as harmful and destructive for individual men as it can be for women.
Writing based on observation and empathy is one thing; but interviewing the people whose experiences you aim to depict - and showing them your work - is quite another.
A graffiti portrait of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World.
Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr
A lack of respect for history, a population conditioned to consume goods at breakneck pace, and pacification of individuals via an entertainment culture: parts of Huxley’s novel strikingly resemble our own world.
Author Michelle de Kretser with her Miles Franklin prize-winning novel, The Life To Come.
Courtesy Perpetual/Copyright Agency/Martin Ollman.
Every character in The Life To Come is complex, frustratingly unfulfilled, marked by kindness, selfishness, or dumb selflessness. But they are always, entirely, convincing.
Kim Scott, whose novel Taboo is shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin award, circles around colonial violence in his work.
The Miles Franklin authors with their novels, clockwise from top left: Felicity Castagna, Eva Hornung, Kim Scott, Michelle de Kretser, Catherine McKinnon and Gerald Murnane.
Courtesy Perpetual/ Copyright Agency/ Martin Ollman/Timothy Hillier. Eva Hornung image: Noni Martin.
In the digital age, libraries got creative about how to translate services they’ve always offered into new formats. And they’ve transformed their spaces to have a variety of community uses.
Behrouz Boochani photographed on Manus Island.
Jason Garman/Amnesty International via AAP
Behrouz Boochani wrote his memoir of incarceration on Manus Island one text message at a time. Translating this work of ‘horrific surrealism’ from Farsi to English was a profoundly philosophical experience.
Gregory Peck and Harper Lee on the set of To Kill a Mockingbird.
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To Kill a Mockingbird is no sermon. Its lessons are presented in effortless style, tackling the complexity of race issues with startling clarity and a strong sense of reality.
Wuthering Heights is anything but a straightforward love story.
In this 1999 photo, author Michael Ondaatje poses at Coach House Press in Toronto. In addition to receiving a coveted spot on the 2018 Man Booker longlist for ‘Warlight,’ Michael Ondaatje recently won the Golden Man Booker prize for his critically acclaimed novel ‘The English Patient.’
(CP PHOTO/Kevin Frayer)
The meanings of Ondaatje’s Golden Man Booker win is complicated and demonstrates the contradictions of literary value. Literary prizes permit us to imagine that literature is more than a commodity.