Murasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji, served in the Japanese imperial court. She transformed her experiences into an intricate narrative fusing fiction, history, and poetry.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Books
Displaying 341 - 360 of 867 articles
Is the belief in art’s healing power just wishful thinking, or is there something to it?
William Faulkner began writing As I Lay Dying the day after the 1929 Wall Street crash. It documents, through the voices of 15 characters, the emergence of a poor white family into the modern world.
Australia’s rich tradition of crime fiction is little known – early tales told of bushrangers and convicts, one hero was a mining engineer turned amateur detective – but it reveals a range of national myths and fantasies.
Fifty years ago biologist Paul Ehrlich published ‘The Population Bomb,’ an apocalyptic warning that overcrowding would lead to wars and famine. Here’s what the book got right and wrong.
Most book clubs are white and middle-class. Even today, books and reading can presume a divide between Indigenous oral story-telling and non-Indigenous literacy.
The Booker Prize is 50 – and to celebrate it, there’s a mega prize.
Rozanna Lilley’s book Do Oysters Get Bored? explores the complexity of family life, contrasting her own unconventional childhood with caring for her autistic son.
Interdisciplinary research led to the discovery that three historic books were covered in a layer of arsenic.
These books will kickstart a lifelong love of reading, and build a bedtime bond between parent and child.
The powerful ideological connection between Australia and agriculture is being increasingly scrutinised. A spate of recent books have recast basic assumptions about our relationship to the land.
Fairy stories come alive in the telling — and the retelling.
A new room will open at the NSW State LIbrary today, furnished with objects from Donald and Myfanwy Horne’s study. Their daughter, Julia, reflects here on a writing partnership and the room that fostered it.
In our ongoing Guide to the Classics series, we look at Heart of Darkness: the product of dark historical energies that continue to shape our contemporary world.
How funny women are turning to ‘femoir’ to promote female empowerment.
In the face of mounting political isolationism, translated fiction might just be the thing to save us.
Climate change is transforming the Arctic, with impacts on the rest of the planet. A geographer explains why he once doubted that human actions were causing such shifts, and what changed his mind.
Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin, follows the travails of a pubescent boy. Somehow, through the spats, crushes and rivalries of a handful of teenagers, the great questions of the human condition are broached.
Tracker Tilmouth was a central and visionary figure in Aboriginal politics. His life is captured in Alexis Wright’s Tracker through the voices of many, rather than the tradition of European biography.
Tim Winton’s latest novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, pushes the author’s classic themes to the extreme.
Top contributors
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Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University
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Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Lecturer, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney
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Honorary Associate in Creative Writing, The Open University
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Executive Dean (interim) Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra
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Lecturer of English, University of Liverpool
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Visiting Fellow, Centre for Cultural and Creative Research, University of Canberra, University of Canberra
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Professor in Publishing Studies, University of Stirling
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Dean of Research (Creative), University of South Australia
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Associate professor, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, Monash University
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Professor of Reading and Children’s Development, The Open University
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Adjunct assistant professor, University of New England
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Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney
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Director, Monash University Publishing, Monash University
