AustLit

'In her debut memoir, Muddy People, Sara El Sayed records her teenage years growing up in Australia as an Egyptian–Muslim migrant. Sara’s parents, both professionals, fled Egypt’s percolating economic and political instability and moved to Queensland, where they were forced to reaccredit themselves while taking a hotchpotch of jobs to keep the family afloat.'  (Introduction)

'In his new novel, Ghost Species, James Bradley walks the tightrope between ideas and entertainment, revisiting a theme that has dominated his writing of late: the possibility of Earth’s environmental ruin.' (Introduction)

'In 1961, at the age of 31, Kenneth Cook released his first novel, Wake in Fright, which remains his most renowned work. In the book, John Grant, a schoolteacher assigned to a tiny town in rural Australia, misses his flight home to Sydney and finds himself stranded in the fictive mining town of Bundanyabba (‘‘The Yabba’’).' (Introduction) 

'A literary gang is forming. It is made up of writers outside of mainstream White Australia recording their experience of living under its dominion. This new wave is characterised by political urgency and has bloomed alongside, or from within, the identity politics movement.' (Introduction)

'Often, short story collections seem arbitrarily composed. They can feel tossed together in an ersatz attempt to be coherent while not adhering to an organising principle that makes them whole. Which says nothing about the quality of the stories in isolation, but is instead an observation of the lack of textual cohesion that plagues so many short-fiction collections.'  (Introduction)

'For many years, books have documented the literary rivalries of writers—Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, A. S. Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble—but Gabrielle Carey’s novella length book Falling Out of Love with Ivan Southall (2018) is the first I’ve read to examine what happens to somebody when they lose faith in the writer who convinced them to become one in the first place. Many of its most interesting elements exist in its story architecture, a part-memoir of Carey’s writing life, part-biography of Ivan Southall that critiques his novels and career. To call his career a legacy, however, may perplex contemporary generations of readers and writers, for whom the name rings no bells. For modern readers, his reputation and writing has truly faded into obscurity. By his death in November 2008, Southall was essentially forgotten: “although mostly unread and unknown to young people of the present generation, in the 1960s and 1970s Ivan Southall was a literary superstar.”(Carey; p6) During his prime he produced over thirty books for children and was the only Australian to be awarded the Carnegie Medal. How, then, does Australia continue to suffer from this cultural amnesia?' (Introduction)

'On 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires ravaged Victoria and ended the lives of 173 people. At the site of the fire that started in Churchill, a town in the Latrobe Valley, detectives found evidence suggesting it was intentionally ignited. Not far from the site, they discovered ‘a sky-blue sedan parked at an odd angle by the grass verge of Glendowald Road. The car looked to have stopped suddenly’. As the detectives gathered witness reports, they heard that during the bushfire, an unusual man was spotted wandering through the blaze, carrying in his arms a tiny dog. The results from the sedan’s plates return, and they discover it is owned by Brendan Sokaluk, a LaTrobe Valley local. From there, The Arsonist, by Chloe Hooper, proceeds in three parts—The Detectives, The Lawyers, and The Courtroom—and ends with the conviction of Brendan Sokaluk.'  (Introduction)

'Reading this book transported me to the days when I read fiction before studying it, under tables at school, in the library, on the porch smoking cigarettes while my parents were sleeping, wondering how surreal yet possible all these fictional worlds seemed. I thought about this moment in my life while reading Dyschronia (2018) simply because devoting one’s life to learning how to write inevitably jeopardises the sense of mystery that one initially found alluring.' (Introduction)

'Am I nervous? Have I been pacing through Dadda's apartment for six hours, smoking through my emergency stash and making minor adjustments to the aircon while Anastasia is passed out/maybe dead on the couch and Dadda is on his way from the airport?...' (Publication abstract)

'Too soon the glint of lightness screams through me, the city lights paler than they're supposed to be, the roads quagmires, as if every motor vehicle in the city mobilised in a pilgrimage to my location, the people rushing by turn wonky and wooden - as scarecrows, or good old straw - until I'm afraid of their smoky, wraith-like deadness, and as I stand on the road I move my tongue along my mouth, checking to see whether the Homer Simpson has dissolved yet. I didn't take it long ago : right after work I puled the alfoil out of the communal work fridge, counted twenty grinning Homers, then took a little taste-test in the locker room. But somethings not right. It's all coming on too soon.' (Introduction)