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 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.
Every character in The Life To Come is complex, frustratingly unfulfilled, marked by kindness, selfishness, or dumb selflessness. But they are always, entirely, convincing.
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 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.