Crime novel about an arsonist who targets a school

Pick of the week

Inside the offshore detention camps

Fictional portrait of crime writer Patricia Highsmith

Essays on old age

An artist paints the plants in a 19th-century Italian garden

The List of Last Remaining is a timely collection from Adelaide poet Louise Nicholas.

Memoir about a pig that changes lives

FICTION

Terry Smyth is an award-winning journalist, playwright, scriptwriter and songwriter, based in Sydney. He is the author of Australian Confederates and a new book, Denny Day: The Life and Times of Australia's Greatest Lawman (Ebury), about the police magistrate who brought 11 men to justice after the Myall Creek massacre.

Michael Herr, the author and Oscar-nominated screenplay writer who viscerally documented the ravages of the Vietnam War through his classic non-fiction novel Dispatches and through such films as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, has died after a long illness.

Many of us have hunted for some kind of understanding of how to fight or embrace death, how to prepare for it and how it shapes our living.

The Sport of Kings is a throwback to eras when everything was permitted and included.

Travel writer, essayist and novelist Geoff Dyer's rule is that no one can come out of his books looking worse than the author himself, writes Michelle Griffin.

Feminist writer Susan Faludi's father was a suburban American dad - until he embarked on a dramatic voyage to uncover his true self.

Sean Rabin's first novel, Wood Green, is at once a brilliantly sustained comic performance, an anatomy of a small community halfway up a brooding mountainside, an imagining of the processes of making fiction and their human costs.

Australian crime fiction has traditionally been centred around the mean streets of Sydney and Melbourne.

Emma Cline remembers driving past San Quentin State Prison in Marin County, California, with her family when she was seven years old. That's Charles Manson's house, her parents would say.

Roald Dahl's Matilda may have her own stage show but Australian author Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda character has snaffled her first animated international television series.

ARAB AND JEW: WOUNDED SPIRITS IN A PROMISED LAND by David Shipler. Broadway Books. . $39.95

A halving of the number of Australian books published each year was "not out of the question" were the Federal Government to open the book market to foreign imports, according to HarperCollins.

How to shoot a bestseller; war prizes; writers' festival for foodies

Temper flares and the police are called at the Williamstown Literary Festival.

The internet generates its own laws at fibre-optic speed.

The life of Bernard Smith, pioneering art critic and historian, is the timeless story of a poor boy who made good.