Twain was an opinionated, prolific commentator on the personalities and political issues of his day.
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He probably would have been amused by – and maybe even befriended – Trump the entertainer. Trump the president? Not so much.
Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, Trouvelot figure. Photograph of electrical effluvia around a coin 1888–89.
© Musée des arts et métiers-Cnam, Paris. Photo Michèle Fava
The way writers drew on electricity to weave their stories tells us much about the history of electricity itself.
Milo Yiannopoulos addressing the media this week.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Independent booksellers are increasingly seeing their role as, necessarily, an active, educative, political one.
Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility: a competent moral agent drawing only on her intelligence and experience.
Columbia Pictures Corporation
This year is the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death and her celebrity continues to grow. But relegating Austen’s work to plots about ‘whether the heroine gets her man’ belittles her achievement.
A painting of Alex played by Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange.
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On the centenary of Anthony Burgess’s birth – A Clockwork Orange had a profound influence on the cultural and political landscape.
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Alternative facts owe more to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s 1984.
The stuff of legend.
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Norse mythology is having a moment as a leading author re-tells the tales for a new generation.
The ‘sky in silver lace’ is Vivienne’s euphemistic metaphor for the encroaching hard times.
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The Melling sisters — like Alcott’s March sisters and Austen’s Bennetts — are four girls who become women during the course of Robin Klein’s trilogy of novels. The Sky in Silver Lace is the most bittersweet of the three.
The lychgate of the Camel’s Back Road Cemetery.
Anne_nz/Flickr
Are the the hauntings at Landour just practical fictions amidst the solitude of the hills?
Universal
Though sharing with Fifty Shades the overall themes of sexual domination and submission, Story of O remains a work of substantial literary merit.
pavdw/flickr
In the face of planetary problems such as climate change, does national citizenship lose its meaning?
For all its millions of female readers, romance fiction has been dismissed as sappy, trashy and dangerous to read.
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Can a gender studies academic also write Mills and Boon novels? And can purple prose be as empowering as a pink pussy hat? The answer is yes, and yes again.
One can find reading material to suit all tastes.
Arif Akhtar/Flickr
From censorship, to mainstream, to Donald Trump: erotica has a long and varied history.
Pexels
What stories can teach children about the world.
Real fictions: Édouard Louis.
EPA Images
‘Autofiction’ has an important role to play in this new post-truth world.
A termite mound in Cape Range National Park: WA’s geography has helped shape its writers.
Susanna Dunkerley/AAP
With its dramatic landscape, relative isolation and vibrant counter culture, Western Australia has a thriving writing scene. But government funding cuts are biting.
REUTERS/Toby Melville
The best selling book on Amazon is ‘1984’ – which was originally published in 1949. A historian from Case Western Reserve University considers how the novel helps us think about our present moment.
‘Maus’ and ‘Watchmen’ are two of the most well-known graphic novels.
Ken Whytock/flickr
The graphic novel has become a literary phenomenon, but the name doesn’t adequately describe the medium’s flexibility, diversity and potential.
Arman Zhenikeyev / Shutterstock.com
Virginia Woolf’s archive can be seen as a serious resource for research into the experience of hearing voices.
Liljam / Shutterstock.com
Tolkien and Zamenhof are two of imaginary languages’ most successful proponents – yet their aims were very different.