The Anti-Cool Girl is a blackly comic Australian memoir for our times and a clarion call for all anti-cool girls everywhere. This is an edited extract from the book. (For a limited time, we have signed copies of the book available for purchase online.)

Oh Rosie. Not even born yet, and already on the run. How exhausting. At a time when you should be concentrating on not growing an extra thumb, you’re being tossed around in your mum’s belly while…

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Baddawi by Leila Abdelrazaq

Raised in a refugee camp called Baddawi in northern Lebanon, Ahmad is just one of the many thousands of refugee children born to Palestinians who fled their homeland after the war in 1948 established the state of Israel.

Leila Abdelrazaq’s graphic novel is a loosely-drawn account of her father’s childhood in Baddawi, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and it’s a surprisingly gentle telling given the subject matter. In short chapters, Abdelrazaq depicts Ahmad’s daily life…

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Events Manager Chris Gordon shares her top five picks from our September event calendar.

If your parents ever told you to never talk about sex, religion or politics in polite company then move away now…. We have all taboo subjects covered in our events program for September and some of them will not make you feel good about where Australian is heading, and why. But by joining in the debate, we hope that you feel inspired to listen a little…

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Here are ten recent picture books that collectively demonstrate the enormous depth and variety in this category, and individually stand tall. We think there are a few future favourites in this list.

Stick and Stone by Beth Ferry and Tom Lichtenfeld

Some things never change, and the tradition of a certain type of kid keeping a collection of sticks, stones and other found items in their pockets is one of them. Sometimes these sticks and stones even need a place…

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Purity by Jonathan Franzen

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz (translated by George Goulding)

Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles by Clare Land

Fever of Animals by Miles Allinson

Prick with a Fork: The World’s Worst Waitress Spills the Beans by Larissa Dubecki

Enchanted Forest by Johanna Basford

Make Me by Lee Child

The Secret Son by Jenny Ackland

Breakfast,…

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The Most Underrated Book Award (MUBA) is presented annually to the best title released by a small, independent Australian publisher that, for whatever reason, didn’t receive its fair dues when first published.

Here are the three books shortlisted for 2015…

Funemployed by Justin Heazlewood

Funemployed goes beyond the press releases and the hype to show what it’s really like to be a working artist in Australia. Through candid interviews, brutal honesty and lacerating wit, Justin Heazlewood (aka The Bedroom Philosopher)…

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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.

Bronte Coates is reading In the Quiet by Eliza Henry-Jones

We announced the shortlist for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction last week and I’m in the process of reading my way through the list. I want to finish all six books in time for our Shortlist Showdown, to be hosted by…

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This month we’re thrilled to be hosting two panels for readers of children’s and young adult fiction at our Hawthorn store. We’d love you to come, and here’s why…

MEET JEN STORER AND LUCINDA GIFFORD

© Lucinda Gifford, 2015, from The Fourteenth Summer of Angus Jack by Jen Storer, illustrated by Lucinda Gifford. Published by ABC Books.

You (and your children) will know Jen Storer from her bestselling Truly Tan books, the hugely fun detective series set in rural Australia…

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Poetry collections are most often gatherings of miscellanea, assemblages of thoughts and ideas and arguments curated over a period of years, textual cabinets of curiosities. This makes it difficult to think of the poetry collection as a fully unified animal – straddling, as it does, different times and places, the different selves who wrote the poems, those who were in love and those who had fallen out of it, and so forth. All of which is a roundabout way of…

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Today is Indigenous Literacy Day. Between 40% and 60% of Indigenous children living in very remote locations across WA, SA and NT are achieving below minimum standards in Reading in Year 3. The Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF) is working to raise the literacy levels of Indigenous Australians living in remote communities by providing access to educational materials, getting culturally appropriate books into homes and schools, and working with communities to create and publish the stories of Indigenous people. My colleague…

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