Riddledom: 101 Riddles and Their Stories by David Astle

$22.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

Why are ladies like arrows?..When is a bird not a bird?..What do you call a nun with a washing machine on her head?..Welcome to the weird new word adventure from David Astle, plunging into the realm of riddles, chasing down and prising open 101 curious questions from around the planet. A mindtrip across time and place, Riddledom uncovers relics from over 50 cultures, delving into language and deception, sampling Pompeii walls and Dothraki warriors. Readers can unravel each mini-chapter, wrestling with riddles from Wonderland or Zanzibar, Oedipus Rex or Harry Potter. Come meet French acrobats, coffee slaves, lusty maids and many more along the way. Riddledom is your chance to roam Tasmania and Mongolia, Fiji and Peru, seeking riddles on clay tablets and Popsicle sticks...As David opens Riddledom: 'If you think riddles are solely the stuff of schoolyards and Christmas crackers, you're about to have your head refurbished.' ...Show more

Great Ideas: Why I Write by George Orwell

$12.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language | Series: Penguin Great Ideas Ser.

Whether puncturing the lies of politicians, wittily dissecting the English character or telling unpalatable truths about war, Orwell's timeless, uncompromising essays are more relevant, entertaining and essential than ever in today's era of spin.

Puzzled by David Astle

$22.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

Many a puzzle solver has battled against the devilish mind of long-time crossword maker and wordaholic David Astle, known to many as DA. In Puzzled he holds out a helping hand to the lost and perplexed, taking us on a personal tour into the secret life of words. Clue by clue, chapter by chapter, we step through a central puzzle, uncovering and unravelling word-secrets as we go. The Steve Irwin Fluke, the Swastika Accident, the Abracadabra Pyramid - hidden meanings, anagrams, reversals - all the Dark Arts are finally revealed. More than a how-to manual, more than a memoir, Puzzled enlightens us about cryptics and delights in the quirky realm of wordplay. It is a book for word junkies everywhere. ...Show more

Axiomatic (Stella shortlist 2019) by Maria Tumarkin

$34.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

This boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, and meditation takes as its starting point five axioms: * 'Give Me a Child Before the Age of 7 and I'll Give You the (Wo)Man' * 'History Repeats Itself...' * 'Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It' * 'You Can't Enter The Same River Twice' * 'Time Heals All Wounds'. These beliefs -- or intuitions -- about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live. The past shapes the present -- they teach us this in schools and universities. But the past cannot be visited like an ageing relative; the past doesn't live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, the past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past -- ours, our family's, our culture's -- wields now? ...Show more

The Gifts of Reading

$5.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

From the acclaimed author of The Old Ways and Landmarks -- an essay on the beauty and joy of reading, for anyone who has ever loved a book Every book is a kind of gift to its reader, and the act of giving books is charged with a special emotional resonance. It is a meeting of three minds (the giver, the author, the recipient), an exchange of intellectual and psychological currency, that leaves both participants the richer. Here Robert Macfarlane recounts the story of a book he was given as a young man, and how he managed eventually to return the favour, though never repay the debt. From one of the most lyrical writers of our time comes a perfectly formed gem, a lyrical celebration of the power and preciousness of the given book. ...Show more

Written in History: Letters That Changed the World by Simon Sebag Montefiore

$35.00 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

WRITTEN IN HISTORY celebrates the great letters of world history, creative culture and personal life. Acclaimed historian Simon Sebag Montefiore selects over one hundred letters from ancient times to the twenty-first century: some are noble and inspiring, some despicable and unsettling; some are exquisi te works of literature, others brutal, coarse and frankly outrageous; many are erotic, others heartbreaking. The writers vary from Elizabeth I, Rameses the Great and Leonard Cohen to Emmeline Pankhurst, Mandela, Stalin, Michelangelo, Suleiman the Magnificent and unknown people in extraordinary circumstances - from love letters to calls for liberation, declarations of war to reflections on death. In the colourful, accessible style of a master storyteller, Montefiore shows why these letters are essential reading: how they enlighten our past, enrich the way we live now - and illuminate tomorrow. ...Show more

The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 by Dorian Lynskey

$32.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

1984 isn't just a novel; it's a key to understanding the modern world. George Orwell's final work is a treasure chest of ideas and memes - Big Brother, the Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, 2+2=5 - that gain potency with every year. Particularly in 2016, when the election of Donald Trump made it a bestseller ('Ministry of Alternative Facts', anyone?). Its influence has morphed endlessly into novels (The Handmaid's Tale), films (Brazil), television shows (V for Vendetta), rock albums (Diamond Dogs), commercials (Apple), even reality TV (Big Brother). The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey is the first book that fully examines the epochal and cultural event that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. It explains how fiction history informs fiction and how fiction explains history. ...Show more

Literary Landscapes: Charting the Topography of Classic Literature by Modern Books

$49.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

Some stories couldn't happen just anywhere or any time - often the scenery , landscape or era is as central to the tale as any character- and just as easily recognised. Wh at adventures would Heidi have had without her mountain neighbours? W ould Jim Hawkins have experienced such an adventure had he not lived in mid - 1700s England? Literary Landscapes brings together an eclectic collage of over 50 familiar literary worlds paired with original maps and archive material, as well as illustrations and photography. In this collection of essays the reader will follow Leopold Bl oom's footsteps around Dublin, become immerse d in Les Mis rable's revolutionary Paris, feel the chill wind of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and hear the churning paddles of Mississippi steamboats in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. The landscapes of enduring fictional characters and literary legends are vividly brought to life, evoking all the sights and sounds of the original works. For anyone wh o ever dreamt of escaping the everyday, Literary Landscapes will transport you to the greatest places in literature. ...Show more

Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen by Mary Norris

$27.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

The Comma Queen returns with a buoyant book about language, love, and the wine-dark sea. In her New York Timesbestseller Between You & Me, Mary Norris delighted readers with her irreverent tales of pencils and punctuation in the New Yorker'scelebrated copy department. In Greek to Me, she delivers a nother wise and funny paean to the art of self-expression, this time filtered through her greatest passion: all things Greek. Greek to Me is a charming account of Norris's lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, goes searching for the fabled Baths of Aphrodite, and reveals the surprising ways Greek helped form English. Filled with Norris's memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine--and more than a few Greek men--Greek to Me is the Comma Queen's fresh take on Greece and the exotic yet strangely familiar language that so deeply influences our own.   'I fell in love with Mary Norris's first book, and am now even more in love with this charming, ribald, highly informed, and always funny excursion through the language, culture, and oddities of Greece and the Greek language. An adventure tale for intellectuals―and also for the rest of us.' Steve Martin 'What a fantastic book! Not only is Greek to Me educational, entertaining, and gorgeously written, it shows us how intellectual curiosity coupled with a dash of bravery can pave the way for a more meaningful life. Mary Norris does for Greek and Greece what Cheryl Strayed did for hiking. Readers will long to follow in her footsteps.' Ann Patchett 'An entertaining, erudite, and altogether delightful journey fueled by the love of language.' Publishers Weekly     ...Show more

Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy by Benjamin Balint

$29.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafk a's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal was also eventually to lead to an international legal battle over Kafka's legacy: as a writer in German, should his papers come to rest with those of the other great German writers, in the country where his three sisters died as victims of the Holocaust? Or, as Kafka was also a great Jewish writer, should they be considered part of the cultural inheritance of Israel, a state that did not exist at the time he died in 1924? Alongside an acutely observed portrait of Kafka and Brod and the influential group of writers and intellectuals known as the Prague Circle, Kafka's Last Trial also provides a gripping account of the recent series of Israeli court cases - cases that addressed dilemmas legal, ethical, and political - that determined the final fate of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939. It tells of a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed to Jews; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in the Israeli courts. Ultimately, Benjamin Balint invites us to question not only whether Kafka's legacy belongs by right to the country of his language, that of his birth, or that of his cultural and religious affinities - but also whether any nation state can lay claim to writers who belong more naturally to the international republic of letters. ...Show more

Nganga: A Dictionary of Aboriginal Terms and Phrases by Aunty Fay Muir; Sue Lawson

$16.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

Books V. Cigarettes (Penguin Great Ideas Series) by George Orwell

$9.95 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language | Series: Penguin Great Ideas Ser.

Beginning with a dilemma about whether he spends more money on reading or smoking, George Orwell's entertaining and uncompromising essays go on to explore everything from the perils of second-hand bookshops to the dubious profession of being a critic, from freedom of the press to what patriotism really means.Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. ...Show more