AustLit

'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)

'From the very first poem, it is clear that Hijabi In Jeans by H.I. Cosar is a deeply personal, and deeply political collection, entwining the two themes to carry through every piece. Cosar, a Turkish-Australian teacher and writer has spoken of her bilingual, bicultural upbringing and the complexities that entailed (ABC, May 2018), and these experiences are clear influences that flow throughout the collection. There is the sense that Cosar is grappling with her fractured identity on the page, wrestling with cultural demons and trying to find a way through the murkiness that is the migrant experience.' (Introduction)

'With four published books, poet, essayist and critic Fiona Wright has become an important voice in the Australian literary scene. Born in 1983 in New South Wales, Wright published her first collection of poems, Knuckled, in 2011. In it, she explores issues such as belonging, identity and sense of place, three themes that constantly re-emerge in her writing. Knuckled was followed by the book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger (Giramondo, 2015), where she writes candidly about her anorexia. This condition, which developed as a consequence of a rare stomach problem, has marked her adult years by triggering questions of what it means to live in a changing and often foreign body. For this book she won the 2016 Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction. The book was followed by the collection of poems Domestic Interior (Giramondo, 2017), in which, as Magdalena Ball explained, Wright is skilful in conflating ‘the domestic or familiar with the moment of transformation’.' (Introduction)

'If one were to pool all the relevant evidence culled from his occasional excoriations of Australian academia, one would soon realise that Patrick White (1912-1990) was hardly ever generous with local researchers, despite the bountiful critical attention he received from them. Entrusting Christos Tsiolkas — a fellow writer outside of the scholarly arena — with the daunting task of reading and writing an appreciation of the entire opus of Australia’s sole Nobel-Prize for Literature therefore comes across as a rather shrewd editorial strategy.' (Introduction)

'On opening the first pages of Jo Langdon’s second collection, Glass Life, one might, at first, have the sense of reading through a poet’s travelogue. Among the first few poems there are descriptions of the modernist Hauptbahnhof station in Berlin or the glaze ice sculpture of the nativity scene (Eiskrippe) in Graz, Austria. Here, a theme integral to the collection is implied: fragility and strength in balance with each other; a starting point for Langdon’s lyrical journey of introspective musings and wanderlust.' (Introduction)

'Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, playwright and activist whose book, No Friend But the Mountain was written by text message over a couple of years on Manus Prison. The resulting work is a powerful, readable memoir with poetry that is a searing indictment of the offshore detention regime. His other works of documentation include writing for The Guardian, a play ‘Manus‘, and a film ‘Chauka, please Tell us the Time‘.  (Introduction)

'In 2015, Robyn Rowland published two books which seemed to be career-defining moments for her. They were the bilingual This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Chanakkale 1915 (originally with Five Island Press in Melbourne and now republished by Spinifex) and Line of Drift (with Doire Press in Galway). Between them they illustrated Rowland’s long and developing involvement with Ireland and Turkey as well as with her native Australia. Her new book, Mosaics from the Map, again from Doire Press in Galway, continues these themes and operates at the same high level of achievement.'  (Introduction)

'If this book were a sound, it would be the roar of a motorcycle down an empty road; bold, and for the moments when it’s in your path, dominating of all your senses. This book swallowed me and churned me in its guts and, as all good books should, spit me back out, a little bit different.' (Introduction)

'Zoya Patel’s No Country Woman: A Memoir of Not Belonging is a collection of twelve memoir essays that explore the experience of growing up as a migrant and person of colour in Australia – in particular, negotiating the tangle of hyphens which Patel inhabits as a female Indian-Fijian-Australian. In the work, then, Patel examines identity, race and gender, from a personal standpoint.'  (Introduction)

'“In the beginning, it was just us and the words,” writes University of Technology Sydney (UTS) student –and writer – EM Tasker. “We sang them into being, and they existed only in our minds. They reproduced by passing from the lips of one person to the ears of another. But that meant they could only reproduce when people gathered. That was until Writing joined the relationship. The resulting ménage à trois was wildly successful.” (171)'  (Introduction)

'Renga: 100 Poems is a collection over ten years in the making. Paul Kane and John Kinsella, writing in exchange via the Japanese renga form, have compiled a long-running poetic dialogue – unlike traditional renga, each poem is individually written and a response then followed by the other poet.'  (Introduction)

'I have been metabolising Michelle Cahill’s work on interceptionality, a term she has been dissecting and championing over three essays with the Sydney Review of Books, the latest published this week. I am deeply interested in her rich theorisation, which is seen in practice with the activism of Mascara Literary Review, interception being a pragmatic, principled approach that can, in Michelle’s words, ‘unmask entitlement and inaugurate dialogue’ but which also, and this is really important – offer creative protection. Creative protection, because the intercepts that Michelle enacts are highly generative actions. Her activism – each tweet, email, newsletter – that calls for better representation and equitable opportunities for CALD writers opens up new sites of potential. I’ve been thinking through what the use of a launch speech might be within an interceptional framework – and indeed where it even fits within the publishing ecology, as it’s not a review, or criticism, but is significant nonetheless, creating a shape and a language for how books will be talked about by others. The launch speech is a powerful object as it oftentimes sets the tone for the critical discourse that will follow. So how to mobilise it?' (Introduction)

'On 31 October 2017, the Regional Processing Centre housing asylum seekers in detention on Manus Island—many of whom had been confirmed as refugees—was closed. For months beforehand, the men detained, as well as refugee advocates and agencies, had warned that the Australian and Papua New Guinean Governments had not properly prepared for this closure. Around 600 men were to be moved to facilities in Lorengau, Hillside Haus and West Lorengau; supporters and human rights observers reported that these facilities were unready. Moreover, before the date for transfer, essential services of food, water, medical care, power and security were phased out and finally withdrawn. The men who had already been protesting their detention and impending forced transfer to sites they believed, with reason, to be unready and unsafe, refused to be moved. They staged a nonviolent resistance for 22 days from 31 October to 22 November 2017 when they were forcibly removed and transported to the new facilities.' (Introduction)

'Speaking recently in Adelaide, the expatriate Australian theorist Sneja Gunew proposed that nations are the museums of identity. I took her to mean that, regardless of our status as foreigner/visitor or citizen/member, we tour them—we observe national identity being curated and performed. But can we resign from identifying our self through nationality; can we inhabit another kind of space that is not even partly defined by it?'  (Introduction)

'Ambitious beyond itself; larger than the sum of a single collection; AXIS is a ‘lifelong long poem’; it is the first book-length installment spanning axes one through thirty-one. Since the publication of AXIS Book I: ‘Areal’ an additional eighteen or so axes have been published in various journals in print and online; and Vagabond Press have just announced that AXIS Book II will be coming out later this year. So in anticipation of the impending release of Book II, let’s start at the beginning with AXIS Book I: ‘Areal’ by a.j. carruthers.'  (Introduction)

'At first, The short story of you and I by Richard James Allen seems to exist in the liminal space between awake and asleep; the space where your psyche turns the familiar sound and scene around you into something altogether unfamiliar; the space where love and death coexist in the same ghostly breath.' (Introduction)

'Australian, Malaysian-born writer Beth Yahp’s short story collection The Red Pearl and Other Stories (2017) navigates between different locations and time periods. It is resolutely transnational and transhistorical in nature. At times, the collection veers towards the metaphysical and abstract. Yahp also experiments with different forms, styles, modes and genres of writing. The title story draws its suggestive force from what a specialist in Asian Australian fiction, Tseen Khoo, had defined as “Oriental grunge” in her analysis of Lillian Ng’s novel Swallowing Clouds. As often in Asian Australian women’s writing, the “sexotic” is deployed as a strategic (al)lure. The cultural politics of the collection’s cover page is relevant in this matter. A young Orientalised woman appears dressed in a crimson cheongsam, looking passive, her lips closed, with the top of her face cropped out from the cover frame. In so doing the Orient comes to be marketed and packaged as a desired object of fantasy deprived of the basic attributes of subjecthood, such as the power to think and reflect, as well as to see and develop a critical worldview, or speak of its own volition. “The Red Pearl” is a love tale between a sailor and a dancer met at the Shanghai Bar. Located in an unnamed Asian port city (most likely Singapore), the story bears “the promise of anonymity, abandonment, delirium, dream,” (Yahp 43) as well as poetic grace. Counter to what might be expected from the book cover, the lover clearly has an agency and power of her own, as proven by the fact that “when she agrees to dance, the sailor lies mesmerised.” (44)' (Introduction)