Claudia Rankine, winner of the Forward Prize, has provoked discussions about poetry and race in the US. Why are these conversations not happening in the UK?
Magda Szubanski’s engaging debut memoir, Reckoning, is an exercise in precisely that: reconciling the past. It is also a celebration of the life and career of one of our greatest comedians.
Anne Summers’ ambitious 1975 book reframed Australian history by placing women at its centre. It was a book of its time. But its groundbreaking approach ensures it is also a book for today.
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?
In the same week that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon of Aylan al-Kurdi made the headlines, I’m reminded of another controversial image. In 1840, J M W Turner exhibited what would become one of his most famous…
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.