Anita Shreve's account of bush fires is terrifying, and her portrait of a bad marriage almost equally so.

Tamara McKinley uses the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries as a meta-historical background for her historical novel, set in 1905.

Robert Dessaix's latest witty and philosophical offering springs from observing that people are increasingly anxious about how they spend their time.

The final book of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unpublished and uncollected stories, I'd Die For You contains work from every period of Fitzgerald's career.

Bruce Grant's memoir offers not only moments in his own life but, as well, course-changing moments in the life of Australia over the last century.

You don't have to have been awarded a gigantic international literary prize to make a winning acceptance speech.

Paula Keogh and poet Michael Dransfield were in their mid-twenties when they met in a psychiatric ward and fell in love. Half a lifetime later, Keogh writes of this dark and ecstatic time.

Sven Brinkmann offers his own contrarian seven steps, inspired by the ancient Stoics, to help you resist the fetishisation of the self.

In the spirit of the absurdist and playful logic that characterises Lewis Carroll's Alice books, A Chink in a Daisy-Chain takes us into the rabbit warren of Phil Day's mind.

Paula Hawkins' first novel, The Girl on the Train, sold more than 20 million copies around the world. So how does she follow that up? With a dark mystery of drowned women.

After after eight years of patience, obsession and digital breakthroughs the definitive guide to 900 species of Australian birds has been born.

The debut novel by Marija Pericic is about a spectacular Kafkaesque literary fraud.

Noted is a festival for anyone who loves to write

The Premier's Literary Awards shortlist flags a coming-of-age of shorter forms of storytelling.

One woman's journey of discovery took her back to the very place she wanted to escape from.

Robert Pirsig, whose 1974 travelogue-cum-philosophical tract, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, sold millions of copies and made him a reluctant hero to generations of intellectual wanderers, died at his home in South Berwick, Maine, on Monday. He was 88.

It has been more than 20 years since a study of Helen Garner's work so Bernadette Brennan's A Writing Life is welcome.

Pronouncing words the right way is important but it's far from an easy matter when it comes to the English language.

It is appropriate for Georgina Arnott to expose the lacunae and misprisions in Judith Wright's own representation of her past to suit her later beliefs.

Literary news and events

Nevo Zisin appeared as a 'case study' in a video for the now controversial Safe Schools program.

Ariel Levy's memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, asks what happens when you can no longer control how the story unfolds.

The best of these pieces are stories of deep pain and the role of animals in healing.

As in the best historical crime series, archival evidence provides the structure for a story that riffs on a history that is also poignantly personal.

Robert Newton's work as a firefighter has given him plenty to think about and include in his fiction for young readers.