A Melbourne Festival theatre piece puts three actors on stage with real-life legal professionals to try accused murderer Hamlet, what's on Australian writer Luke Stegemann's Top Shelf, the 2017 Ausdance awards and

a new stage adaptation of Leigh Hobb's children's book series Horrible Harriet.

Join us for the best of this week's Books and Arts.

Australian writers Ali Alizadeh and Lili Wilkinson join us to discuss why Joan of Arc continues to resonate in literature and art, we hear about a timely play on the limits and tensions of marriage, The One, currently performing at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, meet Steve Lynch who is about to open Australia's first vinyl pressing plant in decades, and get the genuine record groove from the boys from the Vinyl Frontier, this time with a chaotic selection of Australian independent music.

Aaron Foley is the recently appointed Chief Storyteller for the US City of Detroit, Geoffrey Rush plays the famed artist Alberto Giacometti in new film Final Portrait, Australian author Steven Carroll's latest novel A New England Affair is the third in what will be a quartet about the poet T S Eliot.

We speak with Eamon Flack and Pamela Rabe about Belvoir St Theatre's production of Ibsen's Ghosts, meet British fine artist INSA, whose retrospective of signature GIF-ITI is on show now at Sydney's Fringe Festival, speak with comedian Peter Helliar and Miles Franklin winner Sofie Laguna about her new novel The Choke.

Musicians Without Borders brings music programs to war-torn countries around the world, Pakistani English writer Kamila Shamsie's latest novel Home Fire and an exhibition in Sydney explores the idea that the city is shared by animals as well as people.

We travel to real and imagined libraries with bibliophile Stuart Kells, meet our poet of the week performance poet Manal Younus, as well as interview Norwegian journalist and novelist Lars Mytting's about his latest novel and speak with satirist James Colley, author of Too Right: Politically incorrect opinions too dangerous to be published except that they were.

Join us for the best of this week's Books and Arts

Today Tony Kushner's epic theatre work, Angels in America is stripped to its essentials, and we'll hear how, and we trace the songlines of The Seven Sisters in an indigenous curated exhibition at the National Museum of Australia. As well, in The Zone, a timely contemporary dance production by the WA company CO3, we'll explore the build up and aftermath of a natural disaster, and check out the Top Shelf of fantasy author Robin Hobb.

To celebrate Australia's first Reading Hour, an initiative of the Australian Publishers Association, the Libraries and Archives association, we dedicate the entire show to one of our favourite pastimes: the act of reading. Why is it so good for us? What happens in our brains when we read? And are we, in fact, a nation of readers?