The queen of the ghost stories unleashes her eerie imagination.

The records of the early years of the British colony of NSW are a litany of complaints about alcohol.

George Gittoes has spent his career documenting the horrors God's creatures inflict on each other.

Taken as a whole, Barry Maitland's Belltree trilogy constitute an extended commentary on some of the more pressing moral issues facing Australia.

As always, the books I still want to read from this year far outnumber those I have read.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

The magic of J.K. Rowling has kept her at the top of the charts in Australian independent bookshops.

Sometimes the next best thing to gardening is reading about it. Here's a look at the best new books to cool off with over summer.

The Melbourne memoirist, poet and now children's author Maxine Beneba Clarke has racked up two shortlistings in the VPL awards.

What Blonde Ambition: Roxy Jacenko Unfiltered most effectively conveys is the bizarre, surreal nature of celebrity life.

Paddy Roe's Gularabulu represents an important milestone in Australian literature and a bridge between Aboriginal oral culture and non-Indigenous readers.

The success of Bernie Sanders in the run-in to the US Presidential election provided a great ''what-if'' moment.

Laura Woollett explores the darkest corners of the human heart in The Love of a Bad Man.

This updated translation of French decadents from the 19th and early 20th centuries includes subversive fairytales from the likes of Baudelaire, Anatole France, and Apollinaire.

On average seven children and teens are shot dead each day in the US. Unlike mass shootings, the individual killings rarely rate the news.

Laura Miller's book includes a wide range of contributors discussing the lands that so many different authors have created over hundreds of years.

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

Children's author Tohby Riddle was inspired by the wit, absurdity and language play of Dr Seuss.

Is it a bar or is it a bookshop, that is the question? Eamonn Hennessy is combining the two in his new venture.

A small publisher's decision to stop entering its books for awards has revealed how expensive and cumbersome the prize system is – and that most prizes don't boost book sales.

It is a marvel how quickly a book can be written. John Boyne dashed off The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in a little over two days.

Julia Baird was asked to remove some material from her new biography of Queen Victoria because it related to flirtation between her subject and the royal servant, John Brown.

As in the prize-winning How To Be Both, Ali Smith experiments with time, flicking back and forth, painstakingly chronicling the social and political zeitgeist.

The Undoing Project is about two men who changed the way we think.