Readings Best Books of 2024, Non-FictionNominated for the 2025 Sperber PrizeNever before has the media played such an active part in our politics, with Elon Musk using X to affect world elections and direct US government policy. But as Crikey owner and ex-News Corp executive Eric Beecher shows, media moguls have a long history of abusing their power …What’s gone wrong with our media? The answer: its owners. From Will...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

In the heart of the antebellum South, amidst the lush palmetto groves, lies a tale of love, loss, and the enduring bonds of family. "Palmetto Leaves" by Harriet Beecher Stowe paints a vivid portrait of a plantation society on the cusp of change. Follow the intertwined lives of the aristocratic Peyton family and their enslaved counterparts as they navigate the complexities of a world divided by race and class. As tensions rise and secrets unravel, the true nature of their relationships is t...

Maclay School's Journal of Creative WritingOn our title: We take the title of this journal from a novella of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The novella is an existential piece, written before Dostoyevsky's greatest works and before Existentialism had really taken root in literature. The unnamed narrator is frequently named an anti-hero and is described by the note on the back of the Dover edition as a "profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-an...