Literature
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After a year of digital learning and virtual teaching, let’s hear it for the joy of real books
More surprising, perhaps, is the impact these lockdowns have had on children’s and young people’s self-reported enjoyment of books and…
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Nobel winner Kazuo Ishiguro reaches for the sun
Our narrator, Klara, is a robot, an “Artificial Friend”, or AF, designed as a subservient companion for children. Liam Pieper…
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John Keats: how his poems of death and lost youth are resonating during COVID-19
This might seem appropriate on the 200th anniversary of the death of Keats, who was popularly viewed as the young…
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Guide to the classics: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — still for the heretics, dreamers and rebels
What is it that makes Alice, in the words of literary critic, Harold Bloom, “a kind of Scripture for us”…
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Isabel Allende: ‘Everyone called me crazy for divorcing in my 70s. I’ve never been scared of being alone’
The Chilean American author Isabel Allende was a feminist long before she knew what the word meant. Fiona Sturges The Guardian At…
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Beverley Farmer and the solitude of the writing life
In February 1987, when she wrote these words, Beverley Farmer was the author of two collections of short fiction and…
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Film review: in My Salinger Year, hope and optimism win out
Rakoff’s sole responsibility was to read the constant stream of fan mail sent to its most famous client, JD Salinger,…
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You’re using the term Orwellian wrong.
Chances are, you’ve seen George Orwell’s name thrown around a lot in the past week on social media, either by…
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Racists tried to ban this book. How ironic that Ireland might now shun it
To Kill a Mockingbird is part of many Irish childhoods. Should it supply moral instruction? Niamh Mulvey The Irish Times…
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How a lost manuscript revealed the first poets of Italian literature
That was the world of the early Italian Renaissance during the second half of the 15th century. Maria Clotilde Camboni…
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The most anticipated books of 2021
There was a hunger for new voices, new stories and new perspectives that the fiction and non-fiction in 2021 continues…
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Hit the road, Jack: 5 epic literary road trips that are not by Kerouac
A book is still your most faithful companion on summer journeys, even if that trip is limited to the journey…
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Teen summer reads: how to escape to another world after a year stuck in this one
Like many people, Australian teenagers have experienced higher rates of psychological distress this year as a result of the COVID…
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Ancient Greek desire to resolve civil strife resonates today – but Athenian justice would be a ‘bitter pill’ in modern America
Politically and socially, they are rooted in grudges and ideological vengeance that goes back generations, to the New Deal era, when…
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Prime Minister’s Literary Awards: The Yield and The Lost Arabs throw fragile lines across cultural and linguistic divides
I wrote an enthusiastic review of this novel earlier in 2020, and my admiration has not abated in the months…
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Hot off the presses: Good Weekend’s best summer books
What better way to further warm the heart than with a good book on the beach? Nicole Abadee WA Today…
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