Text’s Classics are guaranteed to please. Need a last-minute stocking stuffer or Kris Kringle? Get them a Text Classic! They’re only $12.95 each. What are you waiting for? 

And did we mention that you can get 5 for $50 if you order from our website?

Our trusty Classics editor, David Winter, takes you through his Text Classics highlights for the year:

My highlight in 2017 was undoubtedly Amy Witting, a writer of modesty, fearsome intelligence, and brilliance. I cannot recommend highly enough her Selected Stories, and I also loved A Change in the Lighting.

We republished two cornerstones of the Text backlist, Romulus, My Father by Raimond Gaita and Dancing With Strangers by the late Inga Clendinnen, with introductions that shone fresh light on their enduring importance and appeal.

And a regular Classics bookclub has, happily, forced me to dig back into our 120-odd gems, most recently Henry Handel Richardson’s coming-of-age novel The Getting of Wisdom.

I first read the novel in my teens: truly, youth is wasted on the young, as its psychological acuity and fresh, clever prose went right over my floppy-haired, cloth-eared head. Not this time.

Our trusty Classics publicist, Lucy Ballantyne, recommends the following for your holiday reading pleasure: 

The Classics list is filled with fantastic books by twentieth-century women writers, and I’m particularly excited to welcome the inimitable Thea Astley to the list in 2018. 

My standouts for this year were Helen Hodgman’s Blue Skies: a blackly funny story of a woman stuck in the dreary ’burbs of Tassie that is bleak and brilliant, and Robin Klein’s seminal Came Back to Show You I Could Fly. It’s a gentle, heartwarming story of an unlikely friendship between a young boy and an older, troubled girl. Its portrayal of addiction, and friendship, is profoundly human.

2017 was also the year the late Cory Taylor’s debut novel, Me and Mr Booker, joined the Classics – a darkly comic story about lust, deceit, and the tricky line between adolescence and adulthood. Krissy Kneen was right when she said it ‘has the heart of Lolita and the soul of Catcher in the Rye’.

I am such a fan of Amy Witting’s short stories, and the Selected Stories collection is just gorgeous.

Perhaps my very favourite Classic is Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings – Wall Street in the mid-’90s, and Cath has turned in freelancing for the corporate world in an effort to support her husband, who has Alzheimer’s. It’s bleak, funny, unsentimental – the perfect antithesis to too much Christmas cheer. 

We think you can safely wrap up Christmas with all of the above.

Head over to our Text Classics page for our full list. It’s never too late to indulge yourself in the best literature that ANZ has to offer.

Text Classics are available at all good bookshops, on the Text website (free postage!) and in ebook.

TL;DR: Text recommends you give these wonderful Classics a try over the holidays.

Until next time, 

Keep reading,

The Texters.