AustLit

'Helen Garner’s third and final volume of published diaries covers three years, from 1995 to 1998, during which her marriage to author Murray Bail finally broke down. As a diary – one, moreover, written by an author with an avid and democratic eye for telling detail – it is obedient to the unruliness of the form. This is a book assembled from perceptual flotsam and daily happenstance – gossip and anecdote, dreams and the weather, overheard dialogue and stray literary quotation.' (Introduction)

'The first thing to know about Scary Monsters is that it consists of two novellas bound top to tail within a single paperback. It’s a design decision that reinforces the world-turned-upside-down nature of the stories contained: one a narrative set in France – what that story’s narrator drolly labels le centre historique – and the other taking place in the ahistorical non-place of suburban Australia.' (Introduction)

'For Virginia Woolf, it was Hamlet. A play the Modernist giant found so resonant and abundant with meaning that she thought an annual re-reading, along with a record of the reader’s shifting responses to the text over time, would form a kind of autobiography – the self coming to know itself through sustained engagement with a work of art.' (Introduction)

'Tony Birch has published four short story collections in a little over a decade, a dedication to the form with few comparisons in contemporary Australian literature. He writes stories as Ernest Hemingway suggested a true practitioner of the craft should – with the devotion of a priest and the guts of a burglar – but he also shares with the great Modernist a determination to winnow inessentials. Perhaps because he was raised in straitened circumstances, Birch has become adept at making do with less.' (Introduction)

'Elegant, urgent and angry: Geordie Williamson reviews the six titles vying for our most prestigious literary prize'

'Emma Batchelor’s debut novel, winner of this year’s The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, overflows with avowals. Through all the twists and turns of its narrative – a story built from real journal entries and emails kept by the author over a period of years – one constant is the phrase “I love you”. (Introduction) 

'“Never marry an outsider, never have less than five children, never go against the family, never go against the village, and never question me.” So ran the script that Arab men in Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s family passed onto their sons.' (Introduction)

'Rick Morton writes prose like drag artists perform gender: with unabashed enthusiasm, stylistic flair and carefully calibrated exaggeration. Readers are first distracted by the glitter-bombs of wit on display. Only afterwards do they note the pathos and intelligence on which the act is built.' (Introduction)

'Though it may seem so for many emerging from lockdown, loneliness has not always been a fact of life. Bonds between family, community and broader society were, for better or worse, stronger in the past than they are today.' (Introduction)