Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visitors are kindly advised that this website includes images, sounds and names of people who have passed.
All users should be aware that some topics or historical content may be culturally sensitive, offensive or distressing, and that some images may contain nudity or are of people not yet identified. Certain words, terms or descriptions may reflect the author's/creator's attitude or that of the period in which they were written, but are now considered inappropriate in today's context.
 |
In the Library (or anywhere with a Library card for NSW residents) |
 |
Only in the Library |
 |
Publicly available |
Using the button above, you can search through the Library's entire collection, ranging from:
Get a Library card to request and use material from the Library’s collections.
We’re a reference library, not a lending library:
HSC Info collection:
Find the best new books and recent magazines from Australia and around the world in our Governor Marie Bashir Reading Room. There are over 1,000 new books available to browse and read in our Critics’ Picks section on LG1 and LG2. Books are organised by subjects such as Literature and Language (on LG1); Social Sciences and Current Affairs; Business and Politics; Science, Technology and Medicine; Arts and Recreation, and History, Geography and Travel.
How to Find Critics' Picks in the catalogue
This shows you how to search for Critics' Picks books; you can swap 'literature' for any subject you're interested in.
Why not use them as inspiration for choosing your extended reading and research?
Most books have been reviewed by top critics, including the Australian Book Review, New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.
Introduces new areas of critical thinking. Each chapter provides a case study of texts, including poetry writing guides, steampunk, a Seamus Heaney poem, critical climate change, film adaptations of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and e-readers.
This book claims Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces and is produced by its context, provoking a critical re-evaluation of the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts.
Explaining why theory is important and how to use it, Tyson introduces students of literature to this often daunting field in a friendly and readable style. The clearly structured chapters are based on major theories such as reader-response theory, New Criticism (formalism), psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, lesbian/gay/queer theories, African American theory, and postcolonial theory.
A readable yet critical guide to global horror fiction and authors. Beginning with the modern genre's roots in the 19th century, this book covers 20th-century horror literature in all of its manifestations, whether in comics, pulps, paperbacks, hardcover novels, or mainstream magazines, and from every country that produced it.
Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. She survives by hunting and trading - and forgetting. But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a legendary creature, Ren is inexorably drawn into an impossible mission.
The story of three generations of family living in Kalgoorlie, where gold was discovered in 1893 by an Irish-born prospector named Paddy Hannan. Sisters Nell and Frances were raised by their grandparents and were once closely bound by reading and fantasy. Now they live in Sydney and are estranged. Frances decides to make a journey home to the goldfields to explore what lies hidden and unspoken in their lives, in the shadowy tunnels of the past.
Working at an outback wildlife park, Jean receives disturbing news of a pandemic sweeping the country. This is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals. The unstoppable voices become overwhelming and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean's son. McKay asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.
Mitchell Library Reading Room
© Digitisation & Imaging Services, State Library of NSW
