AustLit

'Pung’s new book One Hundred Days is set in the mind of a 16-year-old whose mother traps her in their commission flat after she falls pregnant.' 

'I was a bookish child with a voracious hunger for stories. At the age of four, I would hold a tiny torch under my blanket at preschool during nap time so I could keep reading. I devoured all the books and demanded more. In those early days, the books that captured my imagination were about magical, impossible things: fairies, pixies, kindly moon folk. I pored over Australian kids’ books such as Animalia, Possum Magic and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, losing myself in colourful illustrations of strange creatures, rather than anything rooted in the real.' (Introduction)

'My mother was a piano prodigy. She started playing as a child in Vietnam, and by the time she was a teenager, she was giving concerts. That’s how she met my father – he was in the audience watching her perform, and by the end of it, he had to know this girl. It was the early 1970s, not long before he went to war.' (Introduction)

'“Writing in the first person is writing that admits that experience is always truncated,” writes Ellena Savage. The Melbourne-bred, Athens-based writer is powerfully self-aware in her debut essay collection, which marries cultural criticism with personal experience to both inhabit and deconstruct the memoir form.'  (Introduction)

'Named for the Greek myth about a race of people who indulge in hedonism rather than dealing with the realities of life, Emily Clements’ memoir follows two time lines: the author throughout adolescence, and the author, aged 19, living in Vietnam, having just fled from her toxic best friend. The earlier memories show a girl desperate for social approval, self-conscious about body image and hungry for male attention – even when it’s interlaced with danger or disquiet. The impact of Clements’ experiences as a girl mirror her life in Vietnam where, after years of conditioning, she sees her body as a powerful tool that can easily betray her – and finds herself in a terrifying situation that is the catalyst for an empowering personal shift.' (Introduction)

'Within the pages of the first short-fiction collection from Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings, we are transported to a series of engrossing micro-worlds. Editor Rebecca Starford writes in the introduction that “stories offer a way to explore the most urgent issues of our time”. Indeed, these 18 stories are tied to the concerns of 2019, from the everyday to the more abstract and unabashedly political.' (Introduction)

'“She wrote weird stories with no endings,” one character observes of another in Joey Bui’s debut. In a way, this could be said of Bui’s writing, too – Lucky Ticket is a strange and spellbinding collection of short stories with question-mark conclusions, presenting glimpses into the ordinary and extraordinary lives of migrants. These stories often finish on an image, a thought or a reflection, rather than offering any closure – they are about lives in flux, ever changing and not so easily defined. Even when diving into matters of great emotion, Bui largely avoids sentimentality, writing with a pragmatism that will feel familiar to anyone raised in a migrant family.' (Introduction)