May 25, 2013 Crime writer Annie Hauxwell is a patient St Kilda fan, has a horror of chicken factories and enjoys the colourful mix of Cohen Place.

May 25, 2013 A poem outsourced and delivered digitally is the lynchpin of Ashley Hay's second novel.

May 25, 2013 Based on the true story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman executed in Iceland in 1829.

May 25, 2013 Considering that she has been such a powerful presence in Australian poetry for at least the past half-dozen years, it is a surprise that Hotel Hyperion is only Lisa Gorton's second published book of verse, after 2007's Press Release . Readers have known her through such anthologies as Black Inc.'s Best Australian Poems, in which she has featured from 2008 to 2012. Gorton is also the author of the eerie and frightening 2008 young-adult novel Cloudland, whose concerns with clouds, deep space and the uncanny are vividly present in her poetry as well. Thus the title poem of her new collection refers to the hotel, formerly a prison (''its guest rooms kept the old locks'') that travels far into space, ''voyaging/to the forsaken places'', drawing us there too, as if in a dream, or recovered memory.

May 25, 2013The Great Gatsby's potential as movie material was recognised from the start.

May 25, 2013 Hannah Kent has a fine turn of phrase. It is this, more than anything, that makes Agnes Magnusdottir, the central figure in her debut novel, both elusive and captivating.

May 25, 2013 Our cultural divide is an issue that needs to be seriously discussed.

May 25, 2013 Author Vaddey Ratner survived the Khmer Rouge, and her first novel is based on what happened to her and her family when she was 5-9 years old.

May 25, 2013 Menzies: ''I understand the Italians have found them very troublesome.''

May 25, 2013 In a strange and compelling literary project, the author combines Proustian self-consciousness with the voyeurism of reality television.