AustLit

'Among the subversive pleasures of Paul Theroux’s travel writing are his intermittent encounters with Australians. To use the local vernacular, he hates our guts.Over the decades, Theroux has happened across us everywhere — mountain highways, city parks, remote deserts, tropical islands — and invariably he finds us tanned, crude and vapid. Our presence affronts his efforts to venture forth in the bazaar of the global exotic, unmolested by the ordinary.“The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume,’’ he writes at one point. After one night on a train, closely confined with a batch of Aussie backpackers, he calls their company ‘‘a reminder that I’d touched bottom’’.Theroux doesn’t get Australians. We pop up in the most outlandish places, like some noxious weed. We move bravely through the world, but always in a bubble of unthinking privilege. We are inveterate wanderers, though in Theroux’s cantankerous view also rubes who don’t understand or appreciate the places we go. Why, he seems to be asking, do we bother?' (Introduction)

'Truth is stranger than fiction,' Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator, the travelogue that included his visit to Australia. And 'Aust­ralian history.' he decided, 'does not read like history, but like the most beautiful of lies … but they are all true, they all happened.'Fiction and identity have been significant themes of Richard Flanagan’s work, with most of his books exploring the blurred borders between­ history and narrative, the public and the personal, truth and invention. (Introduction)

'How well do we know our loved ones? Do we ever truly see behind the self-protective masks they present to the world, and us, or understand the deep-seated doubts that trouble them? And how would we respond if we did? Two recent graphic novels navigate these concerns in compelling if strikingly different ways.' (Introduction)

'Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novel Mercy on Me is all slash and swagger, from the glowering, loping Nick Cave of the cover to the trailing words of Cave song Jubilee Street at the end ('can’t remember anything at all …').Kleist’s confabulation begins with a chubby-cheeked, pouty-mouthed teenage version of the Australian musician, composer, writer and actor. Playing on the train tracks in small-town Warracknabeal, Victoria, flirting with and skirting risk, Nicholas Edward Cave is a leaping, exultant boy with a cluster of flustered friends in his wake.' (Introduction)

‘What’s the good of thinking of misery when you’re ­already miserable?” That question from Anne Frank sparked some intense debates when we were studying her diary at high school. What was the value of examining the travails of another? Would we learn about life’s greater meaning? Could it help us keep our daily challenges in perspective?As guidebooks for resilience, the three books under review fit into that thinking, telling acutely personal tales of how to survive, and possibly even thrive, in the face of enormous personal trauma.' (Introduction)

'There are plenty of people claiming to be book nerds these days. On Instagram, for example, there are more than three million images under the #booknerd hashtag, most of them cutesy scenes of paperbacks arranged around vintage teacups or stacked in piles and photographed with snoozing cats. In The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, Melbourne book trade historian Stuart Kells storms on to this embarrassing scene, shattering the pretenders’ non-prescription spectacles and toppling pretentious book stacks on sight. Here, kids, is what a real book nerd looks like.' (Introduction)

'Unless we are hardcore hermits, our lives intersect with the lives of others, for good and for bad, sometimes with love, sometimes with hate. This is one of the challenges of writing memoirs or autobiographical novels: you can be as kind, or as unkind, to yourself as you like but you need to be sensitive to, or at least aware of, the feelings of other people.' (Introduction)