“[T]hrifty sheet printing manages risk: the almanacs selling steadily, the devotional tract perpetually reprinted, the blank form to keep one afloat, the fugitive ad of merciless gain,” writes Matt Brown in his cultural history of eighteenth-century British American print shops. #TheNovelandtheBlank

Of The Season, Helen Garner writes: "Really I'm trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die."

In a big book hiding in an elegant little book, Jacqueline Labbe convinces you that Austen and Smith are "a matched pair, complete, together, imperfect apart."

In Clam Down, Chen writes of writing about her father: "He overreacted to perceived slights because he read others in the most uncharitable light, but in her case, was he so wrong? . . . She was ashamed to think . . . she had even drawn a chart for herself of rising action and increasing stakes."

Phyllis Rose: "This book had an enormous impact on my thinking and career. . . . Rereading Diane Johnson's masterpiece now, I appreciate more than ever its wit and generosity, the sheer delight to be found in the prose."