The Book Council of Australia began to take shape last week when MUP director Louise Adler was announced as its chair. But what is its purpose, and how will it embrace the industry’s new voices?
Recent events in Mexico’s drug war could easily have been depicted in Don Winslow’s twin novels The Power of the Dog and The Cartel. Drug war capitalism is, at times, stranger than fiction.
The book prize is the publisher’s answer to the persistent grumble that fiction is in its death throes; an attempt to combat the perceived threat of the digital.
When most people think of book censorship, they imagine political regimes and potentially book burning in Nazi Germany. What is little considered is that most books that have been challenged or banned are books for young people.
Pratchett’s work is often classified as ‘genre fiction’ rather than literary fiction. Yet his relationship with genre is complex and adversarial. He sets genre stereotypes up to be deconstructed.
David Attwell’s new book is the first extended investigation of the South African author composed since the recently-opened Coetzee archive at the University of Texas. So what does it teach us?
Framing younger writers’ work within the footsteps of giants is always fraught with risk; the risk of shadowing the merits and faults of the former in an attempt to assess the legacy of the latter.
More than a dozen political memoirs were published in Australia last year. Does that make us a nation of political junkies? If not, why so many books and what do they contribute to cultural debate?
Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has been called “one of the great novelists of our time” and her Neapolitan novel cycle “an unconditional masterpiece”. But the author herself remains an intangible figure.
Yoga fiction is a burgeoning genre of books that tell tales of spiritual enlightenment through an ancient Indian practice. But what happens when such practices are severed from their cultural roots?
As individuals, we are driven by thoughts of success, so it makes sense that failure might make us feel slightly uneasy. And yet failure – and what that means in writing – is having a moment.
‘I knew and counted Terry among my friends, and I watched Alzheimer’s slowly and insidiously strip him of attributes and faculty.’ So what can we make of his final Discworld novel, published posthumously?