The Bookshelf

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Sep 2, 2022 • 60min

The Book Club: Is crime fiction a literature of resistance? (plus a guide to Korean lit)

RN's Book Club in a different format to usual: a panel discussion plus a quick reading guide. The big question: Is crime fiction a literature of resistance? Also, a guide to fiction in translation from Korea
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Aug 26, 2022 • 60min

Three monks in a boat, the last white man, and wild wild women

A story of three men trying to create a new world, on a craggy island in seventh-century Ireland, in Emma Donoghue's Haven; anxieties about race and migration, in Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man; and scrappy voices from history, in Selby Wynn Schwartz's fragmentary lesbian colloquy, After Sappho.
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Aug 19, 2022 • 60min

Joan of Arc re-imagined, dystopian coastlines and trees in the Oz literary imagination

Joan of Arc as a capable, scrappy young woman; unmoored on a strange coastline; and trees in both crime fiction and the Australian literary imaginary: reading Scott McCulloch's Basin, Katherine J Chen's Joan (with Prof of Philosophy Karen Green) and crime writer Margaret Hickey's Stone Town on both crime and landscape
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Aug 12, 2022 • 0sec

A champion pedestrianist, an island haunted by grief and running into all your exes

Reading Robert Drewe's Nimblefoot, Eliza Henry-Jones' Salt and Skin and Sloane Crosley's Cult Classic with critic and literary judge Susan Wyndham and novelist and funeral director Jackie Bailey
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Aug 7, 2022 • 54min

Big Weekend of Books at the State Library of NSW: writers special

Writers Hayley Scrivenor, Michael Brissenden and Yumna Kassab join Kate and Cassie onstage to talk libraries, stories, trauma, failure, children, Australian identity and more in this Big Weekend of Books edition of The Bookshelf
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Jul 30, 2022 • 54min

Reviewing the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner and shortlist

Reviewing the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, Jennifer Down's Bodies of Light, and shortlist with theatre writer Tom Wright and literary critic and interviewer Nicole Abadee
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Jul 23, 2022 • 54min

An urn full of memories, an everlasting lightbulb and what to read next: Chris Womersley's The Diplomat and Anjali Joseph's Keeping in Touch

Reading Chris Womersley's The Diplomat and Anjali Joseph's Keeping in Touch plus a guide to Sri Lankan fiction from Smriti Daniel and what's coming out later this year with independent bookseller Mark Rubbo. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction
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Jul 16, 2022 • 54min

Paul Daley's Jesustown, A G Slatter's The Path of Thorns, and a guide to books for kids

Contact history and its 'saviour' mythologies turned upside down in Paul Daley's Jesustown; inside-out fairytales and an invented gothic world in A G Slatter's The Path of Thorns (read by Elizabeth Flynn); and a guide to middle-grade fiction from writer Tristan Bancks. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction
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Jul 9, 2022 • 58min

Dystopias, ship's monsters and trees: Claire G Coleman, Jokha Alharthi, Jess Kidd and Jane Rawson

Australian dystopias, historical shipwrecks and women's lives in Oman: reading Claire G Coleman's Enclave, Jokha Alharthi's Bitter Orange Tree and Jess Kidd's The Night Ship with guests novelist Sally Piper and essayist Eda Gunaydin; and Jane Rawson on her A History of Dreams and its influences
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Jul 2, 2022 • 54min

The Book Club: Celebrating Australian literature for the ABC's 90th

Reading Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and Patrick White's The Vivisector with critic Geordie Williamson - and with words from the writers themselves, as well as other voices and commentators from the ABC Archives

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