If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting!   When reading PG Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens recently I was struck by the narrator’s curiosity regarding “to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private...

  Earlier this morning I read that the term “friend zone” is set to enter the OED. It’s a term that I stumbled over only relatively recently, probably within the last few months or so, and it’s only after spending some time thinking about and reading up on it this morning that I managed to pinpoint exactly what about it bothered...

    Last year I read the wonderful MacRobertsonland, a rich biography of a once-renowned Melburnian chocolatier and entrepreneur whose name now only rings the scarcest of bells: his Willy Wonka-like empire has dwindled to a trio of chocolate bars and a high school named in his honour. In The Empress of Ireland, a ripping novelesque biography of...

  It’s like we’re complementary colours…you know what those are, right? Colours that make each other disappear? So if you cross red with green—or blue with orange, or yellow with purple—you get a pale, pale colour, almost white… Interestingly, though, if you put complementary colours next to each other, they make each other...

  It is the 1980s, and semiotic theory has infiltrated the hallowed halls of America’s ivy league universities, bringing with it its anarchic reconstructions, critical symbolism, and its anaemic, black-clad supporters. Drawn by the promise of greener grass and the potential to be part of a “lit-crit elite”, English major Madeleine Hanna...

Pearl’s family is a group of three: her mother, her granny, and Pearl. But Pearl’s grandmother is suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s, and Pearl’s mother is struggling to cope. Pearl knows that something’s wrong, but she’s not sure what to do: things are changing, and she’s no longer sure where she fits in. At school,...