AustLit

'We need to have a talk with the girls in the office about the uncomfortable liminality of the tops they wear over their leggings. It is becoming extremely distracting, the ontological indeterminacy of their fashion. Is it a blouse? Is it a tunic? Is it a dress? These troubling questions are not conducive to productivity in the workplace.' (Introduction)

'Whenever I am up high, looking out over the city, I feel like a character in a movie. Not that I feel myself to be glamorous or interesting the way characters in movies generally are, but rather, when I look down at the lines of traffic and the neon lights flashing in shop windows, and the tiny people hurrying here and there, this experience seems to come to me secondhand. I have had this experience many times before, but at some remove, when watching a film in which a sad female protagonist looks down from a window in a high-rise apartment and observes the lines of traffic and the neon lights flashing in shop windows, and the tiny people hurrying here and there, noting the miniature bustling of the city with great interest because her own life seems to have paused and she doesn't know, for the moment, how to make it travel forwards again...' (Publication abstract)

'Seventeen weeks after they moved to the city, Sofia stole her boyfriend’s mouth. She’d been toying with the idea, on and off, for months. She knew it was the lazy way out. She didn’t want things to just be handed to her – she wanted to work, to grow. She had been to the Volkshochschule and sat on a hard chair for three hours waiting to be given a number to be given a lesson. Around her the glow of green walls with no windows and a queue that made no sense, peeling posters that she deciphered, word by word, guess by guess. The classes were booked for the next three months: that was fine. She waited patiently, downloaded apps on her phone and practiced phrases with waiters and supermarket employees. Ich hatte gerne, she said. Tut mir leid, she said. Einmal Glas Rotwein, she said, and gracefully accepted the correction and the drink. She started her classes and tried to take joy in the swift rush of nouns, of simple constructions. Floundered out on the street again. Turned her failures into funny stories, good jokes. She tried her best. She really thought she was doing her best. But in the end it was so much easier to just take what she wanted.'  (Introduction)