by NRB | 1 Apr 2021 | Non-fiction |
These six essays provide insights into the world of surfing both as individual passion and national symbol. In his introduction to this collection of Australian surf writing, Jock Serong asks whether surfing is a sport or a culture. It is estimated there are between...
by NRB | 11 Feb 2021 | Non-fiction |
These stories range widely across different experiences of disability, and question why disabled people must always be the ones to adapt to the world. In her introduction to this remarkable collection of personal essays, Carly Findlay writes that she didn’t identify...
by NRB | 9 Feb 2021 | Non-fiction |
Craig Munro examines the author-editor relationship through the lives of four Australian editors. Like most editors, sometimes I wish that I had a whip that I could use with authors. However, as Craig Munro demonstrates in his engaging tour through Australian letters,...
by NRB | 4 Sep 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
This week we’re delighted to bring you the short story ‘Fallout’ from Emma Ashmere’s debut collection Dreams They Forgot. What haunting stories these are, with their ghosts, betrayals and secrets, ranging back and forth across time and continents. A...
by NRB | 7 Aug 2020 | Extracts, Non-fiction |
This week’s extract is from Christopher Raja’s memoir Into the Suburbs, a story of immigration and family, ambition and tragedy. It is also a resonant portrait of Australia through the eyes of an outsider. Christopher Raja spent the first eleven years of his life in...
by NRB | 27 Sep 2016 | Non-fiction |
The winner of this year’s Stella Prize brings together 12 conversations from The Writer’s Room journal. Ten seconds’ googling will find a plethora of writing advice from amateurs and professionals alike. List after list of writing ‘rules’ to follow for success and...
by NRB | 29 Sep 2015 | Non-fiction |
These interviews construct exciting and substantial explorations of Australian literature. Annette Marfording, lawyer and academic, ‘fell in love’ with Australian literature after moving here from Germany. But she is puzzled. ‘Why is it that Australian writing is...
by NRB | 13 Aug 2015 | Non-fiction |
These two collections give richly personal insights into how books and reading are critical to a strong and resilient culture. To borrow Giulia Giuffrè’s metaphor for libraries and bookshops, entering the pages of these anthologies is like ‘entering...
by NRB | 14 Apr 2015 | Non-fiction |
This book offers an extraordinarily rich and detailed picture of three literary lives and of 19th-century Victoria. Wild Bleak Bohemia is a remarkable exercise in Australian literary history and it is hard to think of another work which compares with it in scope and...
by NRB | 26 Mar 2015 | Non-fiction |
Complex layers of discussion inform this memoir on the fragility of life. In 2011, the actions of two strangers saved Robert Dessaix from ‘being deported from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady’, as Christopher Hitchens...
by NRB | 3 Mar 2015 | SFF |
James Bradley’s new novel reveals a frightening future that grows more possible day by day. A near-future novel that uses the devastating effects of climate change as its setting and yet isn’t a complete downer: that’s quite an achievement, particularly as it also...
by NRB | 11 Nov 2014 | Non-fiction |
The Bush offers a narrative that includes Indigenous people, colonialists, settlers and migrants in a wide-ranging and sophisticated appreciation of our bush heritage. Colonial and post-colonial Australians have always had an ambiguous relationship with the bush. For...