Sochi – currently hosting the Winter Olympics – looks like the beach resort it is, situated on the blue waters of the east coast of the Black Sea, and enjoying a sub-tropical climate. There is what looks…
Jane Austen never ceases to surprise and fascinate us. From Dr Paula Byrne’s claim to have discovered a new portrait in 2011 to Kelly Clarkson’s unsuccessful bid for Austen’s turquoise and gold ring last…
Anniversaries encourage reflection. Now, 100 years after the start of the Great War, anyone who follows current affairs or reads a newspaper is part of a cultural conversation, a widespread reassessment…
Lydia Wevers, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Historically, geographically, culturally – there are many points of comparison between Australia and its neighbour to the east, New Zealand. But there are notable differences. This week, The Conversation…
When William S Burroughs returned to New York City in 1974, after two decades of peripatetic rambling, dubious pleasure and restless escape, the rising rock poet Patti Smith expressed her deep pleasure…
Last year, while designing the cover for Gabrielle Carey’s book Moving Among Strangers (UQP, 2013), Gabrielle and I started talking about book trailers. A book trailer is a short video created to promote…
I don’t know whether Australian author Matthew Reilly ever studied Aristotle, but he certainly studied action novels. As the subject of tonight’s Australian Story on ABC, Reilly’s affinity with the Greek…
“I live a Cut & Paste kind of life”. So the narrator of Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall tells us. But in terms of its daring exploration of a life little understood and left in shadow, there is…
On 25 January, people all over the world will congregate to feast upon a spicy sheep’s stomach – but not before they’ve recited a poem in its honour. The occasion is Burns Night, the poem is Robert Burns’s…
As a book designer, I’m often asked whether I think printed books have a future. Short answer: yes, but it’s complicated. The future of print question is often followed by a declaration of love for tangible…
Summertime and reading always went together in my family. Whether we were sunbathing on hot silky beach sand or cooling off in the back yard under a shady plum tree, our books came too. In those pre-digital…
Literature has mirrored the shifting economic climate over the past century, according to a study published today by researchers in Bristol and London. When times are tough financially, it seems, books…
My new year’s resolution is to read less, more deeply. By this, I mean that I aim to break my habit of skimming multiple texts at a time; to focus on reading one thing from start to finish, before moving…
I was somewhere in the middle of Howard Jacobson’s 2010 Man Booker Prize winner The Finkler Question and finding it uncompelling. (Sorry, Howard.) I needed a potboiler pick-me-up stat. What better than…
I spent most of 2013 living overseas and from afar Australia’s beauty and its fault lines came into sharp focus. In my reading I found myself searching for insight, and three Australian stories stood out…
Put simply, typography is the art of making language visible: designing what words look like on a page or screen. Before desktop computing, typography was a specialised trade. Now, anyone with access to…
Do you remember how people used to walk about with ghetto blasters, so you could hardly escape the high-volume throb of some visceral drumbeat? Being alive now is like having your head permanently wedged…
Last weekend columnist and broadcaster Phillip Adams published a piece in The Australian lamenting what he called the “coca-colonial cringe”: Like you I measure my life with American movies, music and…
The Costa book awards shortlists have been announced and the one thing that dominates people’s first reactions has been the fact the fiction shortlist is made up entirely of women authors. Is the response…
A great football novel is like a perfectly executed bicycle-kick goal, like players such as Argentine legends Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi; they come along once in a generation. Against the accumulated…