AustLit

'In each of the stories in this collection, the authors examine the conundrum and contradiction of human experience through carefully crafted narrative detail. The brevity of short-form fiction makes it an apt vessel for capturing the haunting incompleteness of human experience. Memorable short stories resonate because they are attentive to specificities and particularities: to detail as it relates to a distinct focalising consciousness. The authors in this collection employ narrative detail with intuitive hands and minds, fashioning an apprehended fictional world, an abstracted reality that resonates beyond the final lines of text. Each story here is marked by the urgency of idea, captured as raw sensory data. Collectively, they are attentive to the crucial relationship between idiosyncratic voice and sharply rendered detail, creating an experiential world that ‘feels real’ to the reader.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Incompleteness Book is the result of a call for contributions to the theme: the incompleteness of human experience. The call was distributed in April 2020, amidst the global pandemic of COVID-19. The collection takes an interest in the relationship between the haunting incompleteness of human experience and short form writing. This, together with the unforeseen challenges of COVID-19, as well as the lure of coming together as writers, is the impetus for the book. The submissions are aimed at capturing our individual and collective experience as a composite picture. The contributions were collected in just nine days.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Reflecting upon the evolution of my fractured novel The Earth Does Not Get Fat (2018), this article asks how narrative form represents underlying ideas. This inquiry reflects an abiding interest in the concept of ideasthesia, or ‘sensing concepts’ (Nikolić 2016). Ideasthesia is a means for deconstructing the ways in which writers sense concepts or ideas in metaphorical or associative ways. As I investigate the development of the fractured form and polyphonic voice in my novel, I take an interest in form as a metaphorical map, a ‘linguistic bridge’ (Cacciari 2008) between the brain and the mind. With reference to Christopher Bollas’ concept of the unthought known (Bollas 2014; 2017), I probe the relationship between narrative structure and latent themes. This extends contemporary debates about form and theme, investigating how fiction writers use cross-sensory modalities and experiential knowledge to plot concepts or ideas. Further, this analysis invites discussion about how ideasthetic practices in narrative represent creative problem-solving. This article focuses on the realist text as a sensory narrative image, a form of abstracted realism.'  (Publication abstract)

'The emerging writers whose stories grace this collection engage in the play of symbolic action and detail, capturing sadness and imperfection through an apprehended fictional world—an abstracted reality. The stories resonate because they are intensely focused upon very particular forms of enquiry: Why do the characters see what they see? How do they know what they know? Perhaps it is this—the focus upon a very particular form of sensory apprehension—that lies at the heart of short stories that resonate beyond the final lines of text.

'The stories in ACE Anthology. Arresting, Contemporary stories by Emerging writers are authentic, the voices diverse and multilayered, translating longing, deprivation, and the raw senses of lived experience, into an urgency of ideas.' (Publication summary)