Our latest blog posts

What we're reading: Helen Garner, Thornton McCamish and Karen Hitchcock

Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.

Mark Rubbo is reading Our Man Elsewhere by Thornton McCamish

Alan Moorehead was an Australian journalist, travel writer and historian. He was also a highly-regarded war correspondent who covered battles in Africa, Italy and Normandy, and later his books published in the the forties and fifties were bestsellers. Then, at the age of…

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Dear Reader, April 2016

by Alison Huber

In March, the winners of the Windham-Campbell Prizes for literature were announced. First awarded in 2013 and administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, prizes are given in the categories of fiction, drama and non-fiction for writers from anywhere in the world whose work is written in English. These prizes are awarded through an anonymous judging process, publishers and writers don’t actually know that their work is being considered. As a result, being informed that…

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Books with LGBTQIA+ themes for kids and teens

by Holly Harper

“It’s okay to be yourself.”

It’s a pretty universal piece of advice that many kids and teens hear, and it makes sense. After all, the difficulty in trying to maintain a façade – to be somebody you aren’t – is a huge burden, especially when you’re already going through the turbulent years of growing up. But with the current opposition to the Safe Schools program and the fact that many people are calling into question the suitability of the material…

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3-for-2 Faber Special Offer

Throughout April, we’re offering a special offer on a select range of award-winning and popular Faber titles - buy two books, and choose a third book in the range (of equal or lesser value) for free!

The range includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry, with titles from Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore, P. D. James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rohinton Mistry, Barbara Kingsolver, Miriam Toews, and Willy Vlautin, among others.

This offer is exclusively available in all Readings shops and online, until…

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20% off vinyl this April

Record Store Day is officially on Saturday 16 April, but Readings is celebrating all month long with 20% off all vinyl.

Handpicked by our passionate music team, our vinyl collection includes old favourites alongside terrific new releases. Come on down to chat with our specialists in person and complete your own collection.

The sale runs from 1 April to 30 April at our Carlton, St Kilda, Hawthorn and State Library of Victoria bookshops. The offer only applies to vinyl currently…

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Readings is the official bookseller for MWF

We’re so pleased to share the news that we’ll be the official bookseller for Melbourne Writers Festival in 2016.

Melbourne Writers Festival is Australia’s biggest literary festival and is set to welcome thousands to events featuring more than 350 international and local guests from the worlds of literature, journalism, philosophy, science and the arts. This year’s festival will run from 26 August to 4 September – look out for the full 2016 program to be launched in late July.

Readings’…

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Best Translated Book Award longlist 2016

This year’s longlist for the Best Translated Book Award has been announced.

Over 560 eligible titles were published last year, written by authors from more than eighty countries and published by 160 different publishers. The judges have selected the following 25 titles.

Arvida by Samuel Archibald, translated by Donald Winkler (French, Canada)

Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker (Indonesian, Indonesia)

Berlin by Aleš Šteger, translated by Brian Henry, Forrest Gander, and Aljaž Kovac (Slovene, Slovenia)

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Highlights from our April event program

by Chris Gordon

Events Manager Chris Gordon shares some of her top six picks from our April event calendar.

Inga Simpson in conversation with Favel Parrett

Join us for an intimate evening with two award-winning authors: Inga Simpson and Favel Parrett. The two will talk about Simpson’s new novel, Where the Trees Were, a story about the innocence of childhood and the scars that stay with you for life.

When? 6.30pm, Tuesday 5 April
Where? Readings Carlton
Bookings? Free, but please book…

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March in review

We’ve had a veritable swag of exciting news to share this past month.

We revealed that we’ll be opening two new Melbourne bookshops this year. One will be a dedicated children’s bookshop based in Carlton, and the other will be based in Westfield Doncaster shopping centre. We were also thrilled (and humbled) to have been shortlisted for the London Book Fair’s Bookstore of the Year Award alongside three other international bookshops: Hoepli in Italy, Rahva Raamat in Estonia, and Sanlian…

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