AustLit

 'Fangirls. Book, music and lyrics by Yve Blake. Queensland Theatre, Belvoir and Brisbane Festival co-production in association with the Australian Theatre for Young People. Bille Brown Theatre, South Brisbane. September 12 We’ve all been there, suffering the acute monomania that is teenage obsession with a pop idol.' (Introduction)

'I was going to start this review of Rachel Griffiths’s directorial debut, Ride Like a Girl, with some background about the main character, Michelle Payne, who in 2015 became the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup.'(Introduction)

;So many and varied are the reasons to find The Rich Man’s House — Australian author Andrew Mc­Gahan’s final, posthumously published novel — problematic that, initially at least, it’s hard to understand why the book succeeds so mightily. Thin characterisation, workmanlike dialogue and a surpassingly strange premise are just a few of the flaws that glare back at those trained to a more orderly reading experience.' (Introduction)

'The author is Michael Wilding, emeritus professor in English and Australian literature at the University of Sydney. He won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction with his Wild Bleak Bohemia in 2015. Once he was the Wild part of Wild and Woolley Publishing.' (Introduction)

'It’s a truism among climate fiction writers that at some point soon all contemporary fiction will become climate fiction. Already, a range of topics demands that the author is awake to the changes taking place. Could anyone seriously write about the Arctic without mention of ice loss? Or bushfires without mention of drought?' (Introduction)

'Early in The Girls, Chloe Higgins recounts her ­father’s reaction when he learns his two other children were killed in the car accident that has put him in hospital. “It is almost cartoonish, the way his mouth spreads open and his eyes push together, his forehead scrunching in on itself … ” Higgins writes of Maurice, who was driving the family car when it swerved into oncoming traffic and burst into flames, daughters Carlie and Lisa still trapped inside.' (Introduction)