Ryan O’Neill knows how to write a short story. His fiction has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings and Westerly. His work has been shortlisted for the Age Short Story Prize and he currently teaches at the University of Newcastle.

This month, we are publishing Ryan’s new collection of stories, Their Brilliant Careers. A playful set of linked stories, this comic tapestry of the writing life takes Australian writing in a whole new direction. In this revised version of one of our most popular articles, Ryan shares his secrets for novice and experienced short story enthusiasts alike.

Debut Australian literary fiction, a New York Times-bestselling essay collection, a coming-of-age memoir from one of our country’s best loved comedians and the cleverest, most cunning satire of literature in recent memory – the August line-up at Black Inc. features some of our most exciting books of 2016. We’re also giving away $500 worth of books! You can give them to your loved ones or keep them for yourself.

Black Inc. are thrilled to have acquired Ruby J. Murray’s second novel, The Biographer’s Lover.

Nona and Me by Clare Atkins has won the 2016 Northern Territory Book of the Year Award. Clare shares the award with Mary Anne Butler for Highway of Lost Hearts.

The Turner House, Angela Flournoy's acclaimed debut novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Set in Detroit, it is a colourful, complicated family saga full of love and pride, sacrifice and unlikely inheritances (and a ghost!). Maxine Beneba Clarke called it ‘a haunting novel: exquisitely tender. Here is a family you’re unlikely to forget.’

Angela is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in New York City. Black Inc. is thrilled to welcome Angela to Australia in August for an East Coast tour, including appearances at Byron Bay Writers Festival and Melbourne Writers Festival. Read an extract below.

Black Inc. Books and La Trobe University are excited to announce the creation of a joint publishing imprint, La Trobe University Press (LTUP).

“I’m stuffed, aren’t I?” Bill Shorten asked the night they toppled Tony Abbott. The Liberals had dragged their battered prime minister from the ring. The new man was dancing. The crowd was roaring with delight.

When Bruce Turnbull died – horribly, shockingly, in a single-engine aircraft that speared to earth in dairy country on the mid north coast of New South Wales – it was a ghastly blow to his only son, Malcolm.

There are many ways to get sick, many ways to crumble and crash. I work as a physician in a big inner-city hospital overflowing with the sick. The orthopaedic ward is full of people who got up for a glass of water and snapped their hip. The psychiatry ward’s full of near suicides and phantom voices drilling holes in people’s heads. The cardiac cath lab’s overflowing with heart attacks. The burns unit usually has one or two people who tipped a bucket of petrol over their head and struck a match. We house the frail and the elderly, the drunken and the overdosed. Hearts and lungs are plucked from the brain-dead and sewn into the diseased; people crowd the emergency department, suffering because their organs are slowly failing the body that shelters them. What made them sick? What is health? What is it that we do to people in a hospital?

Laurinda by Alice Pung has won the Ethel Turner Prize for Young Adult’s Literature at the 2016 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.