Books
CARTOONS
Judy Horacek's life, lived through drawing
KAREN HARDY Judy Horacek talks about her love of cartooning and how things have - and haven't - changed for women.
Books
The Bold and the Beautiful gets turned into romance novels
LINDA MORRIS An Australian publisher has acquired the global rights to bring the lives and loves of the American daytime TV drama from small screen to the page.
Spying
Edward Snowden inspires Miles Franklin authors to join global spying petition
LINDA MORRIS It is the stuff of books and now it has become very real, with Australian authors Anna Funder, Frank Moorhouse and David Malouf joining the fight to demand an end to mass surveillance.
Media mogul's voracious appetite for power and revenge laid bare
Jeff Sparrow 'Ethics? As far as I'm concerned, that's a place to the east of London where people wear white socks.'' That's Kelvin MacKenzie, the legendary editor of Rupert Murdoch's flagship paper The Sun.
Recipe for war
Martin Crotty Historian Paul Ham details events leading up to World War I in a book with broad appeal.
Short jagged sentences cut to the heart of siblings' pain
Dorothy Johnston Eimear McBride has invented her own syntax as a way of cradling suffering. Her linguistic constructions are leaky vessels, as they're meant to be. At the end of the novel, sinking into lake water, it's far from certain the narrator can survive. McBride's sentences are very short, many made up of only one or two words, and instead of proceeding through subject, verb, object and so on, the parts of sentences are frequently reversed.
Tale of homecoming
Peter Pierce With her mother gravely ill, Gabrielle Carey begins a personal journey, interwoven with memories of an expatriate writer.
The world as Kelly felt it
Alex McDermott Welcome to the Kelly book that exceeds Peter Carey's novel. It realises a completely felt, viscerally characterised ''Ned-world'' in a way Carey didn't manage. More than fiction, though, it succeeds as compelling historical narrative, with one minor and one serious caveat. The bantering, zesty prose takes you in and keeps you there. But it is FitzSimons' skill at creating a sense of a fully lived inner world that achieves a consistently transformative effect on the reader's mental world - the mark of a very good book indeed.
Nordic circle thrillers deserve recognition
Reviewer: ANNA CREER Swedish author Mari Jungstedt and Norway's Gunnar Staalesen are two of the ''slow burners'' of Nordic noir.
Sexist baggage revealed
Reviewer: ALISON BROINOWSKI Canberra was born in the Depression, when public servants took cuts in salary and rode bikes to work.
The world as Kelly felt it
Reviewer: ALEX McDERMOTT Welcome to the Kelly book that exceeds Peter Carey's novel.
Literary debut redefines the novel form
Reviewer: FRANK O'SHEA In a bookshop, you might be sufficiently intrigued by the unusual title or the strange cover to pick up this book.
Vibrant story of a potter
Reviewer: SASHA GRISHIN When Australia's great pioneering studio potter Merric Boyd died in 1959, Stephen Bowers was seven years old.
A sense of saintliness
Richard Grant Commitment and generosity are key to the life and work of Nashville writer and bookseller Ann Patchett.
Now for the bad News
Reviewed by Jeff Sparrow 'We go out and destroy other people's lives,' one of Murdoch's journalists once explained.
Labor's pains and pariahs
Reviewed by Gay Alcorn It is unlikely many Australians care deeply about Labor's interminable identity crisis.
Soviet secrets
Reviewed by Ian Cummins A Spy in the Archives is the second volume of memoirs by Melbourne-born historian Sheila Fitzpatrick.
The Last Kings of Sark
Reviewed by Dianne Dempsey In this romanticised, coming-of-age novel, three young people find themselves together for a summer.
Amazon's taxing times
JASON STEGER A blow to Amazon; bring in the owls; a presidential shopping list; how US independent bookshops rule; and a Book Thief competition.
Getting a words-worth
Jane Sullivan What are our literary magazines for? Robyn Annear's answers have made some people pretty cross.
Undercover
Your Family Story
SUSAN WYNDHAM The Book Thief competition; why we need negative reviews; kids like print.
Win a signed copy of The Book Thief
For your chance to attend a VIP screening at The Randwick Ritz in Sydney on January 7, tell us in 400 words or less about the most memorable story your parents told you.
Books
Bad sex award goes to The City of Devi
LINDA MORRIS The single-biggest mistake writing sex in literary fiction is overblown metaphors and simile.
Successor to Fifty Shades of Grey a monster hit
LINDA MORRIS The Sydney publisher who ''discovered'' Fifty Shades of Grey finds e-book success with an oddly named story about a sassy teen heroine and a werewolf.
Books
Is everyone in The Hunger Games drunk and how is Harry Potter nasty?
NICK GALVIN The answer is connected to textual analysis, which also finds a frequent use of 'unwilling' in the Twilight trilogy.
A courageous intellectual map for our strange political times
Martin Flanagan This is one of the books of the year. What I value it for is not so much its central thesis - that free speech is meaningless if giving offence is prohibited - but for the analysis it provides of our strange political times.
Acts of concealment
Peter Craven The restrained genius of Margaret Drabble's writing can be appreciated in her superb new novel.
Art of darkness
Sue Williams Bleak teen fiction is a hit with young readers, but is it good for them?
Breakout from old stereotypes
Andrew Riemer Here is another generously paced novel of the kind we have been getting almost yearly from the phenomenally prolific Tom Keneally.
The crims awful, detectives strange, reading riveting
Review By Sue Turnbull We've been through the mill with psychologist Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan. So much so that I suspected we might have seen the last of them following the dire conclusion to Retribution, the previous book in this series. At that point what looked like the promise of a happy ending exploded into tragedy and estrangement. Evidently, Val McDermid hasn't finished worrying with the pair just yet.
Those who have fled
Christopher Kremmer Dispossessed writers seize an opportunity to reclaim the idea of their country.
Robyn Davidson
Making tracks
SUSAN WYNDHAM Tracks translates to the big screen; a novel way of promoting books; and a push for Australian literature in schools.
Breakout from old stereotypes
Reviewer: ANDREW RIEMER Tom Keneally's intelligence and a mastery of conventional narrative must be acknowledged.
Those who have fled
Reviewer: CHRISTOPHER KREMMER This is an important contribution to a great moral issue of our time - asylum seekers.
The crims awful, detectives strange, reading riveting
Reviewer: SUE TURNBULL Val McDermid's in top form with a dysfunctional couple, and Harry Bingham is almost of equal writing skill.
Too honest for words
Sabine Durrant Elizabeth Jane Howard's life story would rival the plot of one of her much admired novels.
A notebook is closed
Jane Sullivan I won't water down the enormous love and respect I have for Doris Lessing's writing.
Publisher makes a point
JASON STEGER Affirming local bookselling; McBride stays on song; Orwell honoured 80 years on; Archer lifts his target; Notions survives; and Begbie joins The Big Issue.
Holiday reads ideal for MPs
Reviewer: JOHN WARHURST Our new federal MPs should buy these three books with their parliamentary allowance, writes John Warhurst.
War scholar paints big picture
Reviewer: PETER STANLEY This is surely the single best one-volume account of Australia's Great War we now have, writes Peter Stanley.
Tribute to an astute observer
Reviewer: ROBERT WILLSON Beautifully produced and richly illustrated, this is a credit to the publisher, the National Library.
Burial Rites joins strong shortlist for Victorian Premier's Literary Awards
Jason Steger An acclaimed first novel about a woman sentenced to death in 19th-century Iceland is in line for the richest literary prize in Australia, worth a total of $125,000.
World's most expensive print book sells in US
The first book written in the US has fetched $US14.2 million ($15.59 million) in New York, becoming the world's most expensive printed book sold at auction.
Books
Diary of a Wombat author Jackie French named Australian Children's Laureate
NICK GALVIN Dyslexic children's author Jackie French plans to use her laureateship to encourage reading, saying to children 'whose work always looks like a wombat has sat on it, never feel that you are dumb'.
Boy with two mums
How do lesbians start a family? The author of Making Finn explains, writes Karen Hardy.
How to hook a story
NICK GALVIN Best-selling author Di Morrissey on coming home and why she likes being covered in "blood and guts".
No.1 guide in the task of being human
Review by Andrew Fuhrmann Alexander McCall Smith, W.H. Auden and the ''inescapable task of being human''.
Columns
Bookmarks
A look at what's going on in the books world at home and abroad.
Undercover
News and views on books, writers and publishing.
Competitions
Win a signed copy of The Book Thief
For your chance to attend a VIP screening in Sydney on January 7, tell us in 400 words or less about the most memorable story your parents told you.
Video
King's Speech book unveiled
Grandson of Lionel Logue, King George VI's speech therapist, releases book of treasures which fills in the movie gaps.
'Borat' to play Iraqi dictator
Sacha Baron Cohen will portray an Iraqi dictator in a film based on a book believed to have been penned by Saddam Hussein.
Joe Jackson promotes conspiracy book
Joe Jackson hopes to uncover the conspiracy behind his son's death, helping promote a new book 'What Really Happened to Michael Jackson'.
Palin wins Gawker injunction
US federal judge orders Gawker Media to pull leaked pages of Sarah Palin's forthcoming book from its blog.
Former President Bush book tour
Former President George W. Bush has kicked off his book tour with a signing of his book, "Decision Points".
The evolution of the bogan
A new book argues that bogans have transformed into celebrity-mimicking racists.
President Obama pens children's book
A children's book authored by US President Barack Obama hit bookstores across the US on Tuesday.
Magazine under fire for plagiarism
Recipe author Monica Gaudio explains how she first learnt about the US cooking magazine Cooks Source's act of plagiarism.
Keith Richards launches autobiography
Keith Richards signs copies at London book launch.
