Still Life With Cat

Last night in Melbourne's Federation Square, the new Stella Prize for the best book of the year by an Australian woman was launched as ...

In the first of what will no doubt be several Yule-themed posts, we bring you the latest, and seasonal, tale of Simon's Cat, here . Th...

That's the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature that Ms Gillard is placing on the Prime Ministerial office bookshelf. W...

Writers' Week is about to start and I have to do a few things at it, so there's not been a lot of time to blog -- too busy trying to...

My very favourite part of my job doing short reviews of fiction every week for the Sydney Morning Herald is ripping open the bags and boxes...

It's a witty, funny, fast-paced book with some grit and some edge and it's the sequel to a best-seller, but I'm only up to page ...

If you have 25 minutes to watch it, this is just lovely: two of the most elegant and eloquent women I know, Helen Garner and Anna Goldswort...

In the wake of the federal government's decision the day before yesterday to reject the Productivity Commission's recommendation on ...

I've just finished reading the latest Patricia Cornwell. Its title is The Scarpetta Factor , which considering that the previous one was...

When I first saw this article about Publishers Weekly and its all-male-author Best Books of 2009 (ah yes, it's that time of year again...

... were announced today. Evelyn Juers' House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann shared the nonficti...

(1) If you're trying to think through/develop/write a complicated argument about Aboriginal writing and its relationship to ideas about ...

There are four kinds of book review. There's the good good review , which is both favourable about its subject and skilfully, knowledgea...

What would Charlotte think, I wonder, if she knew people were not only still reading her masterpiece nearly 200 years after she was born, bu...

*Yes, that is a joke. I've been seeing a fair bit lately, online and off, about this book: Krissy Kneen's Affection: A Memoir of Lo...

Recent events have inspired me to have another go at reviving my dedicated Aust Lit blog, Australian Literature Diary , which has been lyin...

Wow, a two-week hiatus. I don't think I've not-blogged for that long since I started in October 2005. For some reason this time of y...

In today's Crikey newsletter, Peter Craven reports on the new Harry Potter movie: ... it’s so episodic that it actually has the material...

I sit on the sofa and I read one novel after another: good novels with bad bits, bad novels with good bits, good novels in whose subject mat...

What with first the longlist and then the shortlist , I'm not really all that surprised that the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award has...