This passage is from The Children's Bach by Helen Garner The sisters glanced at each other over Dexter’s head. Elizabeth laid one hand over her heart and raised the other in a gesture of tremendous romantic suffering. ‘Invoking nature!’ she mouthed. But Vicki would not laugh. She stood in the mi...

Mr Pottermack's Oversight is a mystery novel by R. Austin Freeman. Freeman invented the inverted mystery in which the crime is first shown, often from the PoV of the criminal, and then the process of detection is shown. Mr Pottermack's Oversight is of this type. The novel starts with a convict (J...

"The Panther" is an Old English poem, preserved in the Exeter Book, and translated in full by Aaron Hostetter. It's a poem about a panther, but what would the ancient Germanic peoples of Europe have understood by "panther"? Nowadays, the word panther can be used to mean any of three cat species, ...

I recently read a poem called “Where Once The Waters Of Your Face” by Dylan Thomas. What does it mean? I feel there are a lot of terms related to sailing but I’m not sure I understand it completely. It sounds beautiful and I would really love to be able to fully appreciate this work.

In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month, it is time to announce the September–October 2021 topic challenge. Based on the number of votes (+5), the next topic challenge wi...