Reading Trails

Thanks for travelling through the highways and byways of this Reading Trails series. Here’s hoping it’s opened many doors to Meanjin’s archive – introducing you to new writing friends and reading companions along the way, as well as re-uniting you ...

I have just finished reading a piece of fiction about a man who insists on finding out how deep the bedrock is wherever he happens to be standing. I would like to know the name of the woman who wrote ...

Meanjin writers share their favourite books of 2024 ...

To keep the snake in my sight, to not give it more ground, to not relinquish to this snake standing in the door ...

Whatever else it is, reading is surely one of the central activities and interests of literature. Literature, though, is hardly a central activity or interest in contemporary culture. So it seems odd that readers of Gerald Murnane who are also ...

In my grandmother’s day, parents in Hong Kong waited a month before celebrating the birth of their baby. Infant mortality rates were high and families didn’t want to introduce their child to the world until they were certain of his ...

I write sentences. I write first one sentence, then another sentence. I write sentence after sentence. I write a hundred or more sentences each week and a few thousand sentences a year. After I've written each sentence I read it ...

We’re approaching the last week of voting in this year’s ABC-RN Top 100 poll of Australian books. This week’s reading trail celebrates Brian Castro, author of twelve novels as well as non-fiction and poetry – and one of Australia’s most ...

Brian Castro's Literary Career Brian Castro dramatises and even valorises forms of literary and artistic failure throughout his fiction, but his body of work is a raging success by mortal standards. None of his novels disappoint on close inspection. Double-Wolf ...

During winter I live in a large room of bicycles and books and spidery imagination. I would love to live this season forever, but life threatens with boiling Christmases, unhealthily tanned beach-goers, loud talking and over-eating, all of which displace ...

Join this week’s trail for a journey into the power and purpose of literature with award-winning Waanyi novelist and writer Alexis Wright. Based on her 2018 Bousbouvier Lecture (The Power and Purpose of Literature), Wright uses this glorious essay to ...

Reviewed: Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, GIRAMONDO ‘Disruption’ may have been a ubiquitous corporate buzzword in recent decades, but nothing seemed to have prepared the world for the upheavals of a global pandemic. In a matter of weeks, the incessant cross-border flows ...

The biggest tree on St Dominic's Mission for Aborigines grew next to the girls' dormitory. It was the only tree that had survived from the twenty-one seeds contained in a seed pod brought by the first missionary on the long ...

Boisbouvier Oration 2018 I thought I would begin this talk about the power and purpose of literature by talking about my 1998 book Take Power. The title came from a Gurindji Elder while telling the story of the ten-year battle ...

This week’s Reading Trail – to spark or complement your thinking and list-making for votes in ABC-RN’s Top 100 Australian Books poll, or simply to whet your reading appetite – begins with “When We Talk About Time”, a lyrical and ...