Well, mostly I’m not: as it is for many of you, it’s fiction that tugs hardest at my heart. But Bron’s personal reading project for 2026 is headquartered here, and I liked the idea of seeing how comfortably just two volumes of non-fiction could nestle into my stack each
I was reading Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818) as the borrowing days approached—days at the end of March, thought to have been borrowed from April so that winter could last just a few more stormy days. We had a most magnificent storm, which
Fabulous and scandalous, Delariver Manley—alongside Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood—was one of the most popular and recognisable among English women writers in the early eighteenth century. She presents readers with a fictional biographer, responsible for telling us her own story, in The Adventures of Rivella (1714). She is Rivella;
On a roll, reading for Australia Day—January 26th, I decided to reread another old favourite (having had so much fun rereading Ruth Park’s novel below). But this one is 400 pages long and my before-bed read (which is to say that I fall asleep long before I’m bored). So,
Perhaps independent presses are most vital in their willingness to confront, to engage with ideas and possibilities that make readers uncomfortable. Consider Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s book about reading James Baldwin and William Styron, which opens with this epigraph from Raoul Peck’s J’étouffe: “Forgive me in advance,
