Books

In 1726, Jonathan Swift imagined a machine that churns out books by shuffling words at random. Three centuries on, his satire reads like a warning about generative AI

A new national survey finds publishing in Australia is more culturally diverse than it was in 2022. Class and geography, though, still decide who gets a seat at the table

When fans saved a fictional grave on a Welsh beach, they showed how stories can transcend fiction to become part of the world we live in

Written in fury after a failed trial in 1485, the Malleus Maleficarum fuelled 150 years of witch hunts that shaped how Europe imagined, hunted and executed women

The rise of aggressive masculinity isn’t only online – it’s in the books boys love. But those same texts can lead to meaningful conversations about gender and identity

The best stories crackle with a kind of electricity, but why they grab us can be hard to articulate. A new podcast is trying to find the answer

In biology, phylogenetics reconstructs evolutionary relationships. The same technique is revealing the history of the New Testament

The work of author Ian Hideo Levy, the first Westerner to write literature in Japanese, questions the links between language, nation and ethnicity

A new book explores BUMIDOM, the controversial mass migration program from the Caribbean to France from 1963-1982, and the creative works keeping this memory alive

Is Australia's literature curriculum still beholden to its colonial past? New research says it is, with a focus on class and privilege