Michael McGirr

From bestselling author Michael McGirr comes Snooze, a revised edition of the entertaining and enlightening The Lost Art of Sleep (2009). Michael always had trouble sleeping, but the arrival of twins made him realise he'd never known true exhaustion. While he celebrated these small children who brought him so much joy, he also found himself desperately searching for a few...

A profound, funny and uplifting collection of reminiscences about a life in books, now available in a smaller, competitively priced format. Great literature is thrilling. It will feed your hungry mind and take your heart on a journey. It will help you on the wonderful path to one of life's most elusive and hard-won freedoms, freedom from the ego. Here...

Forty and flabby, Michael McGirr hits the Hume Highway on a cheap bicycle. Having stopped working as a Jesuit priest, he is on a quest to find heaven knows what. Along the way, he is joined by Jenny. Bypass is the story of Australia’s main street, the much-unloved highway between Sydney and Melbourne. The Hume has plenty of tales to...

This book is about the quest for order in a perplexing world. Ideas to Save Your Life explores the wisdom of more than twenty eminent thinkers across history, from Pythagoras to the contemporary Australian philosopher Frank Jackson; from Mungo Woman to Martha Nussbaum, by way of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch. It ranges widely across subjects to ask: from where...

A profound, funny and uplifting collection of reminiscences about a life in books. Here are forty texts to read at some stage in your life—forty texts that can enrich you in all manner of ways. Some are recent, like Harry Potter; some ancient, like Homer and Lao Tzu. There are memoirs (Nelson Mandela), poetry (Les Murray) and many of the...