Culture

Local writers are refusing to give up on creatively fulfilling lives.

A recent article on Australian literature’s ‘moral hygiene’ finds familiar scapegoats for the publishing industry’s problems.

It took Dunham eight-and-a-half years to write her follow-up—and it shows. With the benefit of hindsight and time away from the bright spotlight that swallowed Dunham during her Girls years, she writes about that time in her life with a clarity, self-awareness and bittersweet wit.

Frankness comes before fiction in Debra Adelaide’s homage to her late friend in When I’m Sixty-Four.

In our fast-paced attention economy, how did On the Calculation of Volume, a ruminative series about a woman living the same day on repeat, become an international bestseller?

Caro Claire Burke’s viral Yesteryear picks apart the MAGA-coded return to ‘traditional values’ with varying success.

It was only going to be a matter of time before AI wormed its way out of the historic confines of science fiction and into the realm of the social realist novel.

Eating without inhibition and refusing to eat at all may seem like opposites, but in fiction they can function in the similar ways: both destabilise systems that seek to discipline the female body.

‘A writer in midlife can have more steel, more tenacity and be more compelled to take risks because there’s nothing to lose.’

‘Is Wuthering Heights amoral?’ asked the London Review of Books podcast late last year. Of course, and deliberately so, we evidently needed reminding.

In the follow-up to her internationally bestselling memoir, Jennette McCurdy takes the readers on a squeamish journey of teenage lust in an inegalitarian world.

Human creativity sets itself apart from AI slop in this playful comic-essay hybrid on artmaking—the runner-up of the KYD Creative Non-Fiction Prize 2025.

The social media melee is hurting leftist organising, leaving us attacking each other rather than working together.

A recent wave of fiction about the corporate world draws on the gothic and the weird to expose the failed promises of modern life.

RF Kuang’s blockbuster Katabasis is a reminder that the modern university sector is something of a hellscape—but it doesn’t have to be this way.

For a long time, I felt like the books I consumed needed to be worthy. Seeking pleasure instead has reminded me why I fell in love with words in the first place.

As a senior book editor and a reformed lit snob, I’ve watched the rise of the romantasy with interest. Beyond sex and dragons, the revitalisation of genre fiction has hidden potential.

Once upon a time, the marriage plot served the inevitable happy ending. What happens when the institution—and with it, the tidy narrative—slips out of fashion?

An experienced senior editor explores the dire state of the publishing industry.

An iPhone detox didn’t make me more productive, but I did feel free. I don’t want to wake up one day and realise that my most devoted relationship has been with a screen.

A subscription to the world’s most popular streaming service comes with artist exploitation, pseudoscience and the funnelling of profits into the war machine.

Nightclubs were a crucial part of my queer millennial coming-of-age. Current trends show a global decline in nightclubs, but is Gen Z really to blame?

I came close to writing a hatchet job once, and I was confused by how popular the piece became online. Criticism should offer more than a cut-throat execution.

Carving out a sustainable career as a freelance writer requires incredible tenacity, but as a recent memoir shows, it wasn’t always this hard.