…David Burton’s How to Be Happy, a funny, sad and serious memoir of a personal journey through adolescence. How to Be Happy tackles depression, friendship, sexual confusion, academic pressure, love and self-discovery.

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Cory Taylor’s second novel, My Beautiful Enemy, has been shortlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

My Beautiful Enemy explores questions of desire and redemption against the background of a savage racial war. Cory Taylor’s debut novel, Read moreright

‘What would it be like to be the guy who punched Harry Houdini in the stomach?…Unless you believe the conspiracy theories, it was probably just some guy who thought it would be a funny, dumb-ass thing to do.’ Steven Galloway talks to the Globe and Mail about his new novel, Read moreright

‘I think I’d rather enjoy being a dog trainer’: Melinda Houston, author of Kat Jumps the Shark, interviewed at the Wheeler Centre.

What’s the difference between bailing out of a movie, a book or a theatre performance?

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‘The detective story equivalent of the kitchen sink’: Michael Dirda reviews The Mystery of a Hansom Cab in the Washington Post.

This is great fun: the OED birthday word generator tells you what words entered the English language the year you were born.

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A look inside 15 writers' bedrooms.

Books that PREDICTED THE FUTURE, in case you were in any doubt that books were magical.

Here’s a topless bookclub.

Vonnegut books to read before making any major life decisions.

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‘I defy the reader to get through Joyful without shedding tears of mirth and tears of joy…Joyful’s characters are destined to live in memory alongside Winton’s Fish and Lamb families that emerged from Cloudstreet and took up lodging in a nation’s treasury.’
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After weeks of reading and discussion we have whittled more than 250 entries to this year’s prize down to five:

How to Be Happy by David Burton My Lips Are Sealed by Christina Cain Headland by Caitlin Crowley The Turners by Mick Elliott When the Sky Falls by Erin O'Brien

The

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After Clare Wright’s Stella Prize win for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka last week, Michelle Smith considers the importance of women’s literary prizes at The Conversation.

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‘If childhood is life’s great force, and the novel is our unflinching explorer of that force, then Elena Ferrante is the most piercingly astute novelist of childhood we currently have.’ The Sydney Morning Herald on Elena Ferrante’s Read moreright