Toni Jordan’s Nine Days and Brenda Niall’s True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack have been shortlisted for the 2013 Colin Roderick Award.

This award, valued at $10,000, is given to the best book published on an aspect of Australian life.

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Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being has been shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. The shortlist is made up of six books, four of which are by women, and spans five continents.

Former judge Read moreright

10 inspiring bookshops around the world.

Why yes, I would like to read Bukowski’s FBI file.

Great cocktail moments in literature.

I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of “k.” Read moreright

‘Malcolm’s ambition is to displace “good stories” with “true ones”,’ says Leo Robson in the Guardian, praising Janet Malcolm’s latest collection of essays.

‘There’s nothing like watching a master at work,’ says the National, while the Independent says of Read moreright

All my fiction until now has been an attempt to set a bonfire to my family’s past, to burn away all my family’s shame and tragedy and failure. Goat Mountain is the end of that. David Vann on his new novel, out 25 September.

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‘Christchurch forgot what they sat on, and, in the same way but for different reasons, I realised that there was wilful forgetting in my family to the extent that I never once heard my father speak of his parents and only fleetingly and indirectly did my mother speak of hers,’

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Gabriel Roth selects a musical playlist to go with his debut novel, The Unknowns.

In six seconds, you’ll hate me. But in six months, you’ll be a better writer.

In defence of ‘bad’ writers.

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Just possibly, the enigmatically titled “Childhood of Jesus” isn’t a dystopian fiction at all. Joyce Carol Oates reviews J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus in the New York Times.

‘Don’t take any sh*t if you can possibly help it,’ and more Read moreright

‘How to describe the short stories that make up The Double, Australian poet and academic Maria Takolander’s first volume?’ asks the Read moreright

Clever illustrations of words from other languages that, alas, do not have English equivalents.

Ruby Wax loves ‘a-whoring’, and other authors' favourite words.

The eccentric habits of 8 classic writers.

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