Image by Victoria_Borodinova from Pixabay
This Book Week, don’t stress about the costume and don’t worry about what the other mums or dads are sewing or buying. Costumes are fun but what matters is to let your kid read what they enjoy.
Streetscenes, Melbourne, 1950.
Mark Strizic/State Library of Victoria
Jay Carmichael’s novel explores how Australian same-sex attracted men lived during the repressive period after the end of the second world war. But does it impose present concerns on the past?
An anonymous 15th century painting of Isabella and Richard II.
Wikimedia Commons
When Stephanie Trigg was a young reader, The Gentle Falcon, set in 1396, introduced her to the beauty and danger of the medieval world.
An early poster for Monkey Grip, starring Noni Hazelhurst and Colin Friels.
MIFF
Ken Cameron’s film of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip is dark, yearning, weird – and incredibly sexy – writes Ronnie Scott.
Jennifer Down.
Photo: Monique Ferguson
Bodies of Light is brutally precise in its portrayal of the enduring consequences of a traumatic childhood.
Kevin Laminto/Unsplash
Shades of classic literature are discernible in The Diplomat, a novel that delves into the disreputable worlds of art and drug addiction.
Gwen Harwood (1920-1995).
A.T. Bolton/Wikimedia commons
Two new books examine the life and legacy of an inspiring poet whose work resisted patriarchal constraints.
Persuasion. Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot in Persuasion.
Cr. Nick Wall/Netflix © 2022
Persuasion is a distinctly romantic modern comedy in tone – but how much does historical accuracy matter?
Image by rawpixel.com
Pure Colour confirms Sheila Heti as one of the most inventive, searching, scintillating and mind-bending writers working today.
Shutterstock
At Certain Points We Touch tells the story of a doomed relationship in a way that explores the parallels between writing and coming out.
shutterstock.
The old-fashioned Hollywood femme fatale leaps off the leopard skin rug to hijack the narrative in this lurid, avant-garde novel.
The growth of benefits derived from reading for pleasure starts young.
(Shutterstock)
Verbal abilities provide benefits in school and in one’s career. Fostering a love for stories and fiction in children should be a high priority.
Julian the Apostate presiding at a conference of sectarians – Edward Armitage (1875).
Public domain
Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch is an unrequited love story and a philosophical novel that asks how we understand ourselves and others.
Jennifer Egan.
In her latest book, the Pulitzer Prize winning author suggests how the 21st century novel might renew itself.
Brendon Thorne/AAP
In her second novel, Yumna Kassab delves into the connections and unspoken traumas of regional communities.
The Witch - Luis Ricardo Falero (1882)
Public domain
Part historical novel, part speculative fiction, A History of Dreams examines the themes of inequality and authoritarianism from the perspective of a coven of witchy young women.
Orestes Pursued by the Furies - William Adolphe Bouguereau (1862)
Public domain
The Furies is a devastating book, but one that hints at the possibility of redemption and reckoning.
Franz Marc - Caliban: Figurine für Der Sturm von William Shakespeare (1914)
Wikimedia commons
The Fish is a novel about a writer’s growth to maturity, but it is also a strange story about family breakdown, difference and shame.
Steven Carroll.
Tracey Nearmy/AAP
The intimate connections between life and art are explored in the deeply satisfying conclusion to a quartet of novels about one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
On International Women’s Day, two women writers discuss feminism, writing in the age of Trump and Covid – and being ‘flabbergasted’ by the absence of birth from Western art and philosophy.