VCE Literature 2009
Hunting the Wild Pineapple
$24.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
Leverson, the narrator at the centre of these stories, calls himself a 'people freak.' Seduced by north Queensland's sultry beauty and unique strangeness, he is as fascinated by the invading hordes of misfits from the so... More »
Selected Poems
$29.95 (Paperback book / Faber )
For many years there existed a general feeling that the selection made by Auden himself in 1968 was far from satisfactory. It was too short to provide a full introduction to such a large body of work; perhaps it was too ... More »
Regeneration
$24.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
[A] brilliant novel...at its centre is a real-life encounter that occurred at Craiglockhart in 1917 between W.H.R. Rivers, an army psychologist, and Siegfried Sassoon...Intense and subtle, getting responsively under the ... More »
Selected Poems
$22.95 (Paperback book / Classics )
The poems of Charles Baudelaire, collected as Les Fleurs du Mal, are filled with unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity subjects dismissed as unpoetic by French literary conventions of the time. 'Tableaux parisiens... More »
Wolf Notes Second Edition
$22.00 (Paperback book / Giramondo Publishing )
Beveridge's poetry is remarkable for its attentiveness to the humble rituals of life. It discovers richness and grace in the smallest, the poorest, the most awkward of the most transient of beings. More »
Tenant of Wildfell Hall
$9.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive beh... More »
Good Earth
$19.95 (Paperback book / Simon & Schuster )
Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing b... More »
Sugar and Other Stories
$24.95 (Paperback book / Vintage )
The constant theme running through this collection of short stories, the first collection by A.S. Byatt, is that of repetition, taking the form of family patterns recurring across generations, the return of the past in t... More »
Plays: Ivanov / Seagull / Uncle Vanya / Three Sisters / Cherry Orchard
$10.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
Chekov wrote that 'narrative is my legal wife and drama a flamboyant, rowdy, impu... More »
Mao's Last Dancer
$32.95 (Paperback book / Viking )
In a small, desperately poor village in north-east China, a young peasant boy sits at his rickety old school desk, interested more in the birds outside than in Chairman Mao's Red Book and the grand words it contains. But... More »
The Patron Saint Of Eels
$22.95 (Paperback book / Picador )
I loved this book so much I read it twice. Set in the Victorian coastal town of Mangowak the protaganist Noel Lea awakes to find the ditches that line the road outside his barn full to brimming with squirming black eels.... More »
Minority Report
$22.99 (Paperback book / Orion )
Imagine a future where crimes can be detected before they are
committed, and criminals are convicted and sentenced for crimes
before committing them. This is the scenario of Philip K. Dick's
classic story.
In addition t... More »
Bleak House
$14.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal... More »
Selected Poetry
$12.95 (Paperback book / Oxford University Pr )
John Donne (1572-1631) is perhaps the most important poet of the seventeenth century. In his day it seemed to his admirers that Donne had changed the literary universe, and he is now widely regarded as the founder of the... More »
Penguin Book of the Beach
$29.95 (Paperback book / Penguin Books )
The average Australian has conducted a lifelong love affair with the beach and the ocean shores, bays, dunes, lagoons and rivers of the coast. Until now, however, no one has attempted to match the ancient sensual and art... More »
Silas Marner
$9.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is sto... More »
Selected Poems
$27.95 (Paperback book / Faber )
This selection, which was made by Eliot himself, is intended as an introduction to the main body of his poetry prior to Four Quartets, which is available separately in Faber Paperbacks. The selection includes the whole o... More »
Cloudstreet
$18.95 (Paperback book / Currency )
A sprawling stage adaptation of Tim Winton’s award-winning novel. Cloudstreet follows the fluctuating fortunes of two families who inhabit a rambling old house in Perth. More »
Passage to India
$24.95 (Paperback book / Penguin Books )
When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the 'real India', they seek the gu... More »
Copenhagen
$26.95 (Trade paperback / Methuen )
In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionised atomic physics in the 19... More »
North and South
$12.95 (Paperback book / )
When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new... More »
Dont Take Your Love to Town
$24.95 (Paperback book / Univ Queensland Pr )
Ruby Langford Ginibi's bestselling first book is now back in print.
With sales of over 30,000 copies since publication in 1988, Don't Take Your Love to Town is now a seminal work of Indigenous memoir. It has been set for... More »
Idea of Perfection
$22.95 (Paperback book / Picador )
Douglas Cheesman is 55 years old, and the kind of man you would definitely not look at twice. But he can tell you more than you'll ever want to know about bridges. Harley Savage, big and plain, is a thrice-married woman ... More »
Gwen Harwood: Collected Poems
$34.95 (Paperback book / Univ Queensland Pr )
This generous-sized collection contains all six published volumes, as well as most of Gwen Harwood's uncollected poems. It is the outcome of several years of collecting and research by editors who have specialised in Har... More »
A Moveable Feast
$19.95 (Paperback book / Arrow )
'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.' Hemingway's memories of his life as an unknown writer liv... More »
Hedda Gabler & Other Plays
$10.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
In these three unforgettably intense plays, Henrik Ibsen explores the problems of personal and social morality that he perceived in the world around him and, in particular, the complex nature of truth. "The Pillars of th... More »
Washington Square
$12.95 (Paperback book / Oxford University Pr )
When timid and plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing and determined suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a fortune-hunter, decides to put a stop to their romance. Torn between her des... More »
My Brother Jack
$22.99 (Paperback book / Harper Perennial )
David and Jack Meredith grow up in a patriotic suburban Melbourne household during the First World War‚ and go on to lead lives that could not be more different.Through the story of the two brothers‚ George Johnston crea... More »
Major Works
$26.95 (Paperback book / Oxford University Pr )
This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Keats's poetry and prose - all the majo... More »
Philip Larkin: Collected Poems
$29.95 (Paperback book / Faber )
This new edition of Larkin's poems for the first time presents his four published books, The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows in their original sequence.
It also includes an appendix o... More »
Skinned by Light: Selected Poems
$24.95 (Paperback book / Univ Queensland Pr )
Selected poems of award-winning poet and novelist Anthony Lawrence. More »
The Fox / The Captain's Doll / The Ladybird
$22.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
These three novellas display D. H. Lawrence's brilliant and insightful evocation of human relationships - both tender and cruel - and the devastating results of war. In The Fox, two young women living on a small farm dur... More »
Doctored Evidence
$21.95 (Paperback book / Arrow )
When the body of an wealthy elderly woman is found, brutally murdered in her Venetian flat, it is soon clear to the police that the prime suspect is her Rumanian maid, who has disappeared and is heading for Rumania. When... More »
Robert Lowell: Selected Poems
$12.95 (Paperback book / Faber )
In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own... More »
The White Earth
$23.95 (Paperback book / Allen & Unwin )
One spring day in late 1992, when William was halfway between his eighth birthday and his ninth, he looked out from the back verandah of his home and saw, huge in the sky, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. He st... More »
Bypass: The Story Of A Road
$24.95 (Paperback book / Picador )
""All the dirt on the Hume Highway"" (Shane Maloney)
The Hume Highway runs from Sydney to Melbourne. Like all the great roads of the world, it is longer than it is wide. Flabby, unfit and forty, Michael McGirr decided to... More »
Collected Stories
$22.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
Katherine Mansfield's clear, sparkling and perceptive short stories revolutionized the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving, resonant, full of light and colour, they range from sho... More »
Parisian Affair and Other Stories
$19.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly... More »
Rose Notes
$24.95 (Paperback book / Penguin Books )
Charming, infuriating Dobie Kinnear, widower and manipulator extraordinaire, is battling to retain his wits, his authority, and his only daughter, Pearl.
Pearl, a hostage to her ageing father's needs, fiercely resents he... More »
Map of the Gardens
$21.00 (Paperback book / Picador )
A gutsy new collection of short stories by a writer gifted in the language of emotions, these tales read like parables of loss and renewal, and reflect the rural landscape in all its various forms. Rich in images from ma... More »
Dance of the Happy Shades
$24.95 (Paperback book / Vintage )
Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. Described by one of her peers as going around with a 'delicate, rueful smile and a wicked pen', she says of herself: 'I guess that maybe... More »
Selected Poems
$27.95 (Paperback book / Black Inc )
This is the first port of call for anyone wanting to experience the poetry of Les Murray. Completely up to date, it contains Murray's finest work (excluding Fredy Neptune), selected by the poet himself. This beautifully ... More »
Radiance: Play and Screenplay
$21.95 (Paperback book / Currency )
Three half-sisters who have drifted far apart meet again at the ramshackle house on stilts where they grew up. They have come to bury their mother. This volume includes the original play, the screenplay and an essay by L... More »
Running in the Family
$22.95 (Paperback book / Picador )
In Michael Ondaatje's beloved family memoir, fact and fiction blur to create a dazzlingly original portrait of a lost time and place. Ondaatje left Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) at the age of eleven. Almost twenty-five years la... More »
Dead Heart
$18.95 (Paperback book / Currency )
In the isolated community of Wala Wala, Senior Constable Ray Lorkin struggles to keep an uneasy peace between Aboriginal tradition and the law he is sworn to uphold. But when a local man dies in mysterious circumstances,... More »
Hotel Sorrento
$21.95 (Paperback book / Currency )
Three sisters, reunited after ten years in different worlds, again feel the familiar constraints of family life. Hotel Sorrento looks at conflicting concepts of national identity and family loyalty. More »
Collected Poems
$20.95 (Paperback book / Oxford University Pr )
'Rimbaud, the poet of revolt, and the greatest' Albert Camus
Rimbaud is the enfant terrible of French literature, the precocious genius whose extraordinary poetry is revolutionary in its visionary, hallucinatory content ... More »
Wide Sargasso Sea
$19.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece, Wild Sargasso Sea, was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, ... More »
Hamlet: Cambridge School Shakespeare
$16.00 (Paperback book / Cambridge Univ Pres )
Cambridge School Shakespeare considers Hamlet as theatre and its text as script, enabling students to inhabit the imaginative world of the play in an accessible, meaningful and creative way. It approaches the play in a n... More »
Much Ado About Nothing
$8.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
A vivacious woman and a high-spirited man both claim that they are determined never to marry. But when their friends trick them into believing that each harbours secret feelings for the other, they begin to question whet... More »
Frankenstein
$9.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and deni... More »
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
$24.95 (Paperback book / Faber )
Two minor characters from Hamlet offer a novel view of the melancholy Dane. More »
Under Milk Wood
$14.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
As the inhabitants of Llareggub lie sleeping, their dreams and fantasies deliciously unfold. There is Captain Cat surrounded by fish that 'nibble him down to his wishbone', Mog Edwards, 'a draper mad with love' for shy d... More »
Slaughterhouse Five
$24.95 (Paperback book / Vintage )
Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller – these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world'... More »
Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
$12.95 (Paperback book / Classics )
Oscar Wilde's complex identity, as family man and homosexual outsider, socialite, socialist and Irish nationalist, underpins his unique insight into role-playing and the masks we all wear. A Woman of No Importance, for a... More »
Surgeon of Crowthorne
$19.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne was an international bestseller and tells an extraordinary true story of murder, madness and an extraordinary friendship in the nineteenth century. It is the tale of James Mur... More »
This Boy's Life
$23.95 (Paperback book / Bloomsbury )
At just ten years old, Tobias Wolff is reluctantly on the road. His restless, spirited mother is desperate to build a life for them both, but Tobias is struggling with this ever-changing routine. When they finally reach ... More »
Room of One's Own
$9.95 (Paperback book / Penguin Books )
Virginia Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of writers and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual f... More »
Wordsworth: Selected Poems
$16.95 (Paperback book / Penguin )
One of the most enduringly popular of Romantic poets, William Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and belief in the importance of feeling. This volume brings together a r... More »
Sir Thomas Wyatt: Complete Poems
$24.95 (Paperback book / Penguin Books )
As a diplomat in Renaissance Europe, and a luminary at the court of Henry VII, Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote in an incestuous world where everyone was uneasily subject to the royal whims and rages. Wyatt had himself survived tw... More »
Casablanca: Special Edition
$19.95 (Digital video disc / Warner Bros Home Vid )
They had a date with fate in Casablanca!Arguably one of the greatest movies ever produced, Casablanca is a romantic masterpiece. Humphrey Bogart takes the leading role in this "love will conquer all" movie that regularly... More »
Grave of the Fireflies: Collector's Edition
$29.95 (Digital video disc / Madman )
In the aftermath of a World War II bombing, two orphaned children struggle to survive in the Japanese countryside. To Seita and his four-year-old sister, the helplessness and indifference of their countrymen is even more... More »
