AustLit

'The dangerous potential of leaping to conclusions is the backbone of Ross Watkins’ ambitious and deceptively clever debut novel for adults, The Apology. Using a cool, clear style, Watkins has created a suspenseful narrative in which the reader’s expectations are slowly chiseled away as the plot explodes anticipated versions of reality. The novel begins with a brief, untitled and anonymously voiced first page. This opening describes the titular apology and drip-feeds enough context so that, before the narrative even begins, we, as readers, have made various assumptions. The wily ambiguity of this introductory text is only evident as the plot accelerates towards the climax and the reader recognises their initial interpretations to have been dangerously simplistic.' (Introduction)

'Lau Siew Mei’s novel The Last Immigrant revolves around the residents of a small six-house cul-de-sac in Brisbane, Australia. The main protagonist is Ismael, an immigrant from Singapore, who works in the Brisbane office of the federal government department that deals with approving asylum seekers’ claims for protection and residency. Like many representations of suburban life in fiction, the pace of life in this Brisbane street seems calm and unruffled but, inside the homes, the inhabitants’ lives are not only dramatic but – in this case – also interlinked in unexpected ways. Stressed at work, Ismael’s home life is increasingly unsettling – as readers learn that his neighbour has committed suicide, his wife is diagnosed with a serious illness and his daughter plans to move overseas. Despite the rational way that these events and situations can be described and even explained, an eerie sense of creeping malevolence underpins this story as it unfolds. This escalates when Ismael’s cat, Imelda – a surprisingly key figure in this narrative – is nowhere to be found.' (Publication summary)

'In a 1987 interview with Kevin Brophy and Nolan Tyrrell for Going Down Swinging, Bruce Pascoe explained his reason for starting Australian Short Stories magazine five years earlier:

As a writer of short stories I was disappointed with what was happening to my stories when they were published. Apart from the few stories I got published in The Sun and The Sydney Sun-Herald, I wasn’t getting any readers… I started Australian Short Stories because I was offended by the rates of pay, offended by the lack of readership, and felt that the intelligence of the readership was still there. (Pascoe quoted in Going Down Swinging 1987)

'For short story writers living in Australia in 2018, the disappointing situation Pascoe describes is more or less unrecognisable – newspapers accepting submissions for short fiction, indeed!' (Introduction)

'The term ‘prose poetry’ would seem to be an oxymoron, yet the form has been around a long time. Perhaps most notably, Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en Prose (1869) set the form firmly in the modernist poet’s range of technical options for exploring language and what it can do. In general, line breaks matter in poetry, and lines comprise the most obvious compositional or structural units of poems. Indeed, for most traditional forms of English poetry, rhyme and meter are inextricably linked to lines, as in iambic pentameters, for example. In free verse, line breaks structure language in ways that can enhance, replace, or even run counter to an underlying framework of grammar and punctuation. Line breaks obviously affect the appearance of a poem on the page and they can strongly influence how a poem is read aloud.'    (Introduction)

'A trick is an action or scheme that is designed to deceive, but a trick of the light is something more benevolent, closer as it is to an optical illusion or an architectural charm. A trick can take the form of a prank or a hoax, but a trick of the light isn’t planned. If you trick someone, you deliberately outwit them. But if you encounter a trick of the light, what you see is not a gimmick but a distinct impression: an effect caused by the way the light falls on a thing and makes that thing, which doesn’t exist, appear to be real.'  (Introduction)

'If the literary technique of ‘defamiliarisation’ is the usual means through which writers jolt people into seeing the world anew, how does a dystopian novelist shock us into seeing the environmental extremities of today, when ‘extremes’ are increasingly the norm? Furthermore, how can such a writer hope to contribute something original to our long tradition of dystopian fiction, and its rapidly growing sub-genre of ‘Cli-Fi’[1]? Jennifer Mills has taken on these challenges with her new novel, Dyschronia. This striking title refers to the novel’s structural and thematic preoccupation with temporal disorder, while cleverly alluding to both the novel’s genre and to the feeling of ‘dysphoria’ experienced by its protagonist, Sam (66) – that deep sense of ‘unease’ which provokes, and should be provoked by, dystopian stories.'  (Introduction)

'Rachael Mead’s new poetry collection The Flaw in the Pattern continues her important work of watching and speaking through the focal point of the self in the world – in particular, the natural world of place and light and senses and the tracking of our human movement through it. This is the work of a highly skilled and perceptive poet taking charge of her craft: separately these poems offer a range of engaging and challenging windows onto human experience; together they provide a fast-flowing meditation not only on a life in process but the reflective and shaping business of poetry itself. Highly ommended in the Dorothy Hewitt Award for an unpublished manuscript, this collection is now part of UWAP’s ever-expanding poetry series.' (Introduction)

'In his introduction to Fume, a collection of poetry primarily written on Country in Borroloola, Phillip Hall describes his struggle to accept the challenge of Gudanji elder Nana Miller ‘to embrace enough humility to accept that not all complications were easily navigable’ (18). Hall presents himself as having been at times ‘a missionary and a misfit’ (16) and an idealist (15); ‘interactions with spirits and magic’ offer ‘a potent challenge to my secular humanism’ (96), and his poem ‘Discharge’ seems to bluntly lay out some (old) underlying drives...' (Introduction)

'I approach this review not as a poetry expert, a poetry writer, or even (particularly) a poetry reader. Instead, I come to this review of Reneé Pettitt-Schipp’s book, The Sky Runs Right Through Us, through the eyes of a development practitioner. And perhaps also, an ashamed Australian.'  (Introduction)

'Walking with Camels – The Story of Bertha Strehlow by Leni Shilton is a gorgeous, subtle rendering of the both brutal and starkly beautiful Australian desert, and those relationships that exist and are formed within this landscape. Shilton’s verse novel charts Bertha Strehlow’s transformation from a naïve and shaking girl, determined to follow the man she loves into unknown territory against the advice of loved ones, into a woman possessed, damaged and strengthened by the desert. Shilton’s rigorous research, bolstered by found poems and historical and biographical notes, grounds the poems in a moving reality, filled equally with suffering and joy.' (Introduction)