“In London, where Nina lived, it was the time of foxes.” So begins Australian author Jo Lennan’s book of short stories. But if In the Time of Foxes starts like a fairytale, it reads more like a treatise on the grittiness – the small disappointments, …

The blurb for Cherry Beach, Melbourne-based author Laura McPhee-Browne’s debut novel, reads like the most tired kind of chick lit. It promises melodrama – in the form of lifelong friendships torn asunder, unrequited love and men gone bad, …

Elliot Perlman’s new novel, Maybe the Horse Will Talk, centres on a fable that the protagonist, one Stephen Maserov, tells his sons. In the story a tyrannical king decides he no longer finds his jester funny. Realising his life is at risk, …

In the short story “Sentimental Education”, Monica, a 19-year-old university student, asks her lover to flip his language around when discussing sex. She tells him: “In a matriarchy, you’d hear women boasting to their mates: ‘I subsumed him …

About a third of the way through This Excellent Machine, its teenage protagonist, Clem, finds himself in a cafe on the wrong side of town. This is a place where the footpaths are black, because “they’d waited too long to hose down the vomit”. …

“School, as everyone knows, is where books go to get sterilised,” writes Nam Le in his essay On David Malouf, part of Black Inc’s “Writers on Writers” series. But if a classroom can sound the death knell for a love of literature, Le …

Road trips, as epitomised by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, can be a way to unfetter and unbind. Not in Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View, though, where a car is described as little more than a “moving coffin”. In 1970s Australia, …

Into the Fire may sound like a thriller or a lurid true-crime story. But while Sonia Orchard’s novel features a death and a mystery, it is, at heart, more of a tale of the ups and downs of female friendship than a whodunit. One year ago Alice …