Black Inc imprint: 229 books

This extraordinary memoir begins with Don Walker's early life in rural Australia and goes up to the late '80s. In mesmerising prose, Walker evokes childhood and youth, wild times in the '70s, life on the road and in Kings Cross, music-making and much more. Shots is a stunningly original book, a set...

A world-famous Australian writer, an inspiration to Robert Hughes and Clive James, a legendary war correspondent who also wrote bestselling histories of exploration and conservation . . . and yet forgotten? In this dazzling book, Thornton McCamish delves into the past to reclaim a remarkable figure,...

*The eighties were my formative years, and while other teenagers were gyrating to rock 'n' roll, we were praying for revival. We were taking communion, not cocaine. We treated virginity like a wedding present, not a cold sore. And why wouldn't we? We were told we could be, we already were,...

For several years now, Nicolas Rothwell has travelled the length and breadth of Northern and Central Australia. This book collects published and unpublished writing from that time. It contains sundry tales of marvellous places, told in an inimitable style. There are profiles of mystics and artists,...

Where There’s Smoke presents outstanding short fiction by Australia’s finest male writers. These are tales of love, secrets, doubt and torment, the everyday and the extraordinary. A man sleeps at the site of a massacre and wakes refreshed. An unassuming piano tuner is sent off to contribute...

The best of the best … This essential book takes a decade of Best Australian Essays and selects the cream of the crop. These are the pieces that have captured key events – from September 11 to Victoria’s fires – changed the way we see the nation, for good or ill – from Anzac Day to Palm Island...

‘I wanted to showcase those subjects which thoughtful and talented Australian writers were absorbed by in this particular year; indeed (I thought), wouldn’t it be good to show what this country, and its culture, was about in 2010?’ —Robert Drewe This year’s Best Australian Essays...

Monash in his own words . . . Long before this letter can possibly reach you, great events which will stir the whole world and go down in history will have happened, to the eternal glory of Australia and all who have participated. —John Monash, 24 April 1915 These extraordinary, intimate...

Listen. What do you hear? We are surrounded by sounds all the time, but we tend not to hear them; our brains are very good at editing what our ears pick up. If we stop for a moment to listen, there they are: the ticking clock, traffic noise, fragments of conversation, a passing plane. These...

Perceptive and entertaining, Try Whistling This is a pleasurable journey through music, ideas and history. Andrew Ford traces the concept of dirty dancing back to the sixteenth century, marvels at the weirdness of Percy Grainger and considers the decision of Wilhelm Furtwängler to keep conducting under...

My late twenties have felt like a series of slow-motion epiphanies, each one sneaking up before slapping me in my newly acquired jowls. Everything I said I'd do 'by the time I'm thirty' as a glassy-eyed graduate is now in the 'by the time I'm forty' box. Much has been made of delayed adulthood of Gen...

In 2008, the artist Adam Cullen invited journalist Erik Jensen to stay in his spare room and write his biography. What followed were four years of intense honesty and a relationship that became increasingly claustrophobic. At one point Cullen shot Jensen, in part to see how committed he was...

‘What characterises Australian poetry now is its variousness … Here are collage poems with a confessional impulse, short short stories, late surrealist couplets, poems that weave satire and lyric together, fragmentary essays in epistles, metaphysical pastorals, epic narratives glimpsed through...

‘What a rich, strange and diverse lot these poems turned out to be … I suspect that these baroque and potent imaginings can only have come into existence as fragments of dreams or nightmares.’ —John Tranter In The Best Australian Poems 2011, celebrated poet John Tranter selects the...