Championing stylish wordsmiths and sterling conversation, Literati Glitterati is a weekly book show that loves a good story, well told. 

LITERATI GLITTERATI SALON: A MONTHLY BOOK CLUB

Join Mel and a rotating roster of bookish conversationalists as they unpack Literati Glitterati’s book of the month.

Expect a spiriting assortment of cult classics, forgotten wonders, timeless treasures, zesty new releases and pulp fictions wrestled straight from the zeitgeist by Mel herself.

Each book will be announced a month out from the special, so that you can read along at home. On the last Wednesday of every month, tune into Literati Glitterati from midday till 1pm with your thoughts and feelings ready: we’ll be taking questions through the text line.

Literati Glitterati Salon: a monthly book club for folks who like a good story, well told.

NEXT MONTH'S BOOK: A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin.

The Lit Glit salon returns with A Manual For Cleaning Women, a pulverising selection of short stories from the previously unsung queen of story, Lucia Berlin.

Berlin wrote in binges, brilliantly, throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s until her death in 2004. Ten years later, with the release of this book, she became a New York Times Bestseller and the kind of writer I’d start a fight with my then boyfriend about.

You think Bukowski lived a life? Maaaate. If there can only be one true cataloguer of the ugly-beautiful, the itinerant, the mundane-transcendent, the gurgling bottle, to imbue the city dump with the majesty of a field of wildflowers, then Lit Glit decrees: it is she.

On Wednesday 31 July from midday to 1pm, join Mel, writers Tony Birch and Grace Yee, and painter Kirsty Budge for a belter of a conversation about the woman who could be described as the godmother of autofiction. As Berlin herself said – “The story is the thing.”

Buy the collection with the intro by her mate Lydia Davis (!!!!) and the afterword by her son, and be prepared to have your heart shucked like an oyster.