AustLit

'This essay examines Bela Li’s Argosy, Max Ernst’s collage novels and China Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris in relation to an ideology of realism in which the recuperation of avantgarde praxis stands in direct relation to its de-sublimation of an aesthetics of sur-realism. In Li and Miéville’s solicitation of Ernst’s texts, among others, there is a deep ambivalence between the economy of a return to the origin as avant-primitivism and its affordances as (fundamentalist) reaction, in which the antipodeanism of Li’s refiguring of Surrealism describes an exemplary movement. Such antipodeanism also implies a critique of the somewhat paradoxical observation that, “As for the productions of peoples who are still subject to cultural colonialism (often caused by political oppression), even though they may be progressive in their own countries, they play a reactionary role in advanced cultural countries” (Debord, “Report on the Construction” 20).'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A photographic and poetic tribute to the 1966 album, East Broadway Run Down, by saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins–a recording which ended a period of intense productivity following the release of Rollins' landmark, The Bridge, in 1962 and preceding the tenor great's second extended sabbatical from the music industry. This book retraces Rollins' steps from Williamsburg Bridge down New York's East Broadway on the Lower East Side, following a path Rollins took for two years in his search for the "piece of music that was going to explain it all to me." ' (Publication summary)

'A decade-by-decade portrait of 20th century Australia through the prism of one family. Abacus is a portrait of the "end times," of generational violence and the instinct for survival.' (Publication summary)

'Indirect Objects is Prague-based Australian author Louis Armand’s eighth collection, an exploration of physical, psychological and linguistic topographies forming a poetic grammar. The indirect objects of the title are emergent states of experience, perception as language, the unarticulated “real” we encounter as strange and remote in even the most familiar forms of saying. The volume is divided into five sections – “Realism,” “Dark Mingus,” “Broadcast Graffiti,” “Zapata Retrospect,” and “Tür zum Nichts” – each concerned with an exploration of landscapes of fact. Armand’s poetry is populated by places, people, things whose existence describes a potential contained in language as singular and vital as they are.' (Publication summary)

'What do a crashed satellite, a string of bizarre murders and a time-warp conspiracy have in common? Welcome to CAIRO where the future’s just a game and you’re already dead.

'Set between New York, London, Prague, Cairo and the Australian desert, CAIRO has been described as “a vivid, dizzying and ultimately exhilarating exploration of the global nightmare… forceful and convincing and fist-pumpingly hilarious” (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown). ' (Publication summary)