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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.