AustLit

'Australian novelist and short story writer Jennifer Down has been rightly acclaimed, with an impressive list of awards to her name, including the Jolley Prize in 2014. Her new novel, Bodies of Light, is both much more ambitious in scope than her first and an altogether more harrowing read. Spanning the years from 1975 to 2018, and traversing many different locations in Australia, New Zealand, and America, the novel confronts us with child sexual abuse, a suicide attempt, a series of fractured relationships, allegations of infanticide, recurring social alienation, and a serious drug addiction. But it is also, and mercifully, a story of a woman’s remarkable resilience, the possibility of human kindness, and the necessity of hope. Bodies of Light thus has affinities with the feminist Bildungsroman popularised in the 1960s and 1970s; a genre that championed a belief in productive self-fashioning by women in the face of systemic misogynistic oppression.' (Introduction)

'Three recent novels by Australian women deal with current and increasingly urgent political questions about female identity and embodiment. They each use the conventions of popular realist fiction to provoke thought about the causes of female disempowerment and the struggle for self-determination. Coincidentally, they are also set, or partially set, in Australian country towns, although their locations are markedly different, and their plots culminate in the revelation of disturbing secrets.' (Introduction)

'Laura Elvery’s second short story collection, Ordinary Matter, shows the same talent for precise observation, pathos, and humour as her accomplished début collection, Trick of the Light (2018). It differs in its creation of a greater range of narrators and voices, and in its use of a specific ideological framework through which to unify the collection: each of its twenty stories is prefaced by the name of a Nobel Prize-winning female scientist and the ‘prize motivation’ for her award. This device might be read as subverting the sexist stereotype that, denying women the capacity for rational thought, consigns them to the ‘softer’ realms of emotion and artistic endeavour. It also encourages an interesting way of thinking about female desire as it pertains to a range of experiences, including creativity, ambition, motherhood, sexuality, and political activism.' (Introduction)

'The American writer Jack Matthews had no time for what he called ‘a discontent’ with the brevity of the short story. ‘Ask a coral snake,’ he declared, ‘which is as deadly as it is small.’ The claim for ‘deadliness’ certainly applies to four recent début collections; in the tight spaces of the short story, each one presents confronting ideas about contemporary Australia.'  (Introduction)

'Three recent début novels employ the genre of the Bildungsroman to explore the complexities of female experience in the recent historical past.' 

'This slender volume of eight stories is the result of a storytelling project undertaken by the Centre for Stories, and is a joint publishing project in conjunction with Margaret River Press. Four of the voices were recorded in audio and transcribed, with the other four the result of writing and workshopping with author and academic Susan Midalia. These voices are moving, sad, funny, brave and honest, and demand deep contemplation. Born from the silence and stricture of a morally conservative rural Australia, they speak strongly and combine to form a powerful document from voices that might otherwise not be heard.'   (Publication summary)

'Twenty-five-year-old Hazel is reading the classics, starting with ‘A’. It’s one way to pass the time when you’ve quit your job and lost your way.

'But then she has a chance encounter with an irresistible older man. When Hazel is partnered with him on a political campaign, her attraction is deepened by the strength of his convictions. Adam seems to be attracted to her too – but why is he resisting? And what does Jane Austen have to teach a young woman about life, love and literature in the 21st century? ' (Publication summary)

'Barbara Kingsolver, praising the skill required to write a memorable short story, described the form as entailing ‘the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces’. Her description certainly applies to Jennifer Down’s wonderful début collection, Pulse Points. Using the typical strategies of suggestion, ambiguity, and inconclusiveness of those ‘tight spaces’, Down’s fourteen realist stories raise important questions about family, sexual relationships, and the role of place and social aspiration in the shaping of identity. While these are familiar subjects for literary fiction, Pulse Points is especially memorable for its range of characters and voices, and for its often haunting expression of the partial nature of knowledge generated by the short story form.' (Introduction)

1. As time goes by

'One day he was kissing me all over my willing body, the next day he was shouting at me to stop bloody moping around the house. Well, it wasn't actually a day between the kisses and the shouting, that's just an expression. You know, one day this and the next day that, when in fact it's been years, the long slow slide into misery. It was the same with my kids, one day cooing and patting my face with soft pudgy hands and the next day calling me a cow. Moo, I'd said, playfully, pretending to have horns. Cows don't have horns you moron, he'd said, the younger boy that is because the older one doesn't speak to me from one day to the next.' (Introduction)