Our latest blog posts
Meet Agatha, our resident agony aunt for all your bookish queries
Ask Agatha!
Starting in May, we’ll be running a regular book advice column where you can ask our experienced and extremely wise bookseller Agatha all your tricky book-related questions.
You can ask her anything and everything, as long as it relates to books in some way. Some examples of questions she might answer:
My friend has just been dumped by her boyfriend and she’s heartbroken. Can you help me find a book that will cheer her up?
Who wrote that…
An Extract from Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke
by Maxine Beneba ClarkeIn Foreign Soil, Melbourne writer Maxine Beneba Clarke has given a voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, the downtrodden and the mistreated. It will challenge you, it will have you by the heartstrings. This is contemporary fiction at its finest.
Here we share one of the stories from the book - ‘Dave’.
She had a shiny cherry-red frame, scooped alloy Harley handlebars and sleek metal pedals. Her wire basket-carrier was fitted with a double-handled cane lift-out. If I’d learned…
Last week's top ten bestsellers
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Australian Notebooks by Betty Churcher
Stoner by John Williams
Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Little Golden Book by Diane Muldrow
Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi
By Its Cover by Donna Leon
I Quit Sugar for Life: 148 Recipes + Meal Plans for Families and Solos by Sarah Wilson
Piranesi’s Grandest Tour: From Europe to Australia by Colin Holden
Bonkers: My Life in Laughs by Jennifer Saunders
Burial Rites by…
The story of my book: MONA by Dan Sehlberg
by Dan SehlbergSwedish author Dan Sehlberg tells us the story behind his techno-thriller, MONA.
MONA dates back to 1995, to my days at Aftonbladet, Scandinavia’s leading daily. One day we got a video-game from someone hoping for a review. With black and white graphics and a childish layout it seemed anything but exciting – a ping-pong ball jumping back and forth between two moving bricks. But it was not the game itself that was the big thing … it was…
Why we started a Queer Book Club at St Kilda
In May, Readings St Kilda is launching a new Queer Book Club dedicated to reading fiction and select non-fiction books that represent all aspects of LGBTIQ life. Here book club convenor Amy Vuleta tells us why.
(This blog post is an edited extract from Amy’s interview with Time Out Melbourne.)
A friend of one of our staff members approached us with the suggestion of a book club dedicated to reading books that represent LGBTIQ life. The store manager at St…
What we're reading
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.
Nina is reading Friendship by Emily Gould
If you were to design a book to specifically appeal to me, it would probably be this one. A debut novel about two thirty-year-old best friends living in New York, each dealing with various professional and personal dramas. Everything from the title (I love it) to…
Q&A with Ceridwen Dovey
Bronte Coates talks with Ceridwen Dovey about her new collection of short stories.
Only the Animals has a distinct set-up: told from the perspective of ten different animals, each story depicts how they lived and died during human conflicts, and throughout, pays homage to a particular real-life author. Where did this unusual premise come from?
The task I set myself for this book was to see if I could take these over-determined, already obsessively ‘gone over’ experiences of horror, pain…
Children's & YA Books Highlights for April
Let’s all take a minute to consider what it would feel like for our 8th-grade diaries to land us a book deal. Correction: most of us don’t need an entire minute to appreciate the full horror of that. However, for Maya Van Wagenen, the teenage author of Popular, it is turning out extremely well. Her efforts to radically change her high school experience and document it is being met with rapturous applause. Dreamworks have picked it up and Maya…
Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowships 2014
Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowships! The Readings Foundation is supporting The Hot Desk Fellowships with a $20,000 grant.
Each winner will receive a desk of their own at the Wheeler Centre for two months, plus a $1000 stipend provided by the Readings Foundation.
The twenty winning writers for 2014 include André Dao, Aurelia Guo, Bernadette Hince, Chad Parkhill, Christa Jonathon, Claire Wilson, Daniel Bledwich, Eli Glasman, Elin-Maria Evangelista, Emily Stewart, Ender Baskan, Jennifer…
Last week's top ten bestsellers
Diary of a Foreign Minister by Bob Carr
Australian Notebooks by Betty Churcher
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Stoner by John Williams
Cadence by Emma Ayres
N by John A. Scott
By Its Cover by Donna Leon
Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Two Australian non-fiction titles top our bestsellers this week: Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister and Betty Churcher’s Australian Notebooks…
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