AustLit

'The essay, if you haven’t noticed, is having a moment. It’s as if, in the age of the Anthropocene, as we face the end of the world as we know it, reality has finally become too real for make-believe. Delia Falconer’s Signs and Wonders is a collection of essays on subjects as diverse as gum trees and the decline of the paragraph, but its overriding imperative is to confront the reality of climate change. Exactly how it is to be confronted is a problem we all face. Falconer’s essays aim for a sophisticated mixture of reportage and philosophy, with healthy doses of outrage and despair.' (Introduction)

'Researchers have shown that the less you know about something the more you think you know. There is even an apparatus for measuring this correlation between ignorance and confidence: the Dunning–Kruger graph.' (Introduction)

'This paper explores the connection between the mask and fiction writing. Freud has theorised the identifications of writers and readers with the masks of literary personae, but my interest in this essay is with how the mask of a narrator or character can function uncannily to impede identification. I am also interested in research emerging from neuroscience, socobiology and robotics, the last of which has drawn attention to the ‘uncanny valley’, an affect generated by cybernetic beings that deny – by virtue of their mask-like faces – the neuronal mirror activity fundamental to human identity. Both Freudian and emerging scientific research provide the context for the question I ask here: how might we understand the affect generated by a fiction writer who uses the uncanny mask of a narrator or character to refuse opportunities for identification and to elicit, instead, an uncanny crisis in subjectivity within the reader? To answer this question, I employ a hybrid autoethnographic methodology that recognises the primacy of feeling when it comes to the experience of the uncanny and that acknowledges my own compromised position as a writer invested in such unfriendly or sadistic affects.' (Publication abstract)

'Trigger Warning is not for the fainthearted, but neither are the elemental realities of domestic violence and environmental catastrophe that these astonishing poems address. Comprised of three sections, the first summons a difficult personal history by conversing with poets – from Sylvia Plath to Anne Carson – whose dramatised confessions trigger Takolander’s own. The second part remains focused on the domestic, while redeeming that scene of trauma through a reinventing wit. The final section of this extraordinary book turns its attention outside, playing with poetry itself in order to confront the Anthropocene and the final frontier of death. This is poetry that balances ruthlessness and lyrical beauty; poetry alive to its time and audience; poetry not to be missed.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Midnight Oil introduced me to radical politics in the 1980s. Their lyrics opened my eyes to how the world and its problems were greater than my teenage narcissism had allowed. By the time I was studying literature at university, my journal of choice was naturally Overland. Established in Melbourne in 1954 by anti-Stalinist members of the Communist Party of Australia, Overland still prides itself on being the only radical literary journal in Australia, though others have made ground, attesting to an increased radicalism in literary culture generally.' (Introduction)

'It seems hard to believe that Ellen van Neerven’s debut poetry book, Comfort Food, was only published in 2016, given the remarkable evolution we see in Throat, the second collection from the young Mununjali Yugambeh poet. While the titles of both poetry collections similarly draw attention to the mouth, that organ traditionally associated with poets, they do so in ways that highlight the differences between the books. Comfort Food was an offering of short lyrical poems characterised by the kind of openness and generosity associated with acts of sharing meals. Throat, however, is a far edgier book, speaking of vulnerability but also strength, pain and anger.' (Introduction)

'While we are all currently distracted by the threat of Covid-19, the environmental crisis remains front and centre in James Bradley’s new novel, Ghost Species. Earth is “past the tipping point” and entering a phase called “the Melt”. Sea ice has vanished, even a northern summer lasts for six months, the ground is sinking as permafrost melts, forests are on fire and two-thirds of all wildlife has become extinct. The situation is becoming desperate. Enter a renegade, megalomaniacal tech billionaire, Davis Hucken – described by one character as “Doctor fucking Evil in a hoodie” – who believes the answer to the world’s problems lies in resurrecting extinct species. Having already revived mammoths and thylacines, he hires two young-gun Australian scientists, flies them into a luxurious facility in the Tasmanian wilderness and tasks them with reanimating Homo neanderthalensis.' (Introduction)

'The Animals in That Country, the debut novel of Laura Jean McKay, has certainly hit the jackpot for timeliness. The novel is about a virus that sweeps through Australia, leading to government lockdowns and generating widespread hysteria. That virus even has an association with animals, though the effects of the novel’s “Zooflu” are very different from those of Covid-19. Humans infected by the “talking animal disease” develop the discombobulating ability to understand non-human animals. Plot-wise and with regard to tone, this novel is a hybrid beast, sitting somewhere between the dystopia of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the absurdity of Doctor Dolittle. However, as an attempt to reimagine how we understand our place in the animal world, this novel stands alone.'  (Introduction)

 (Publication abstract)

'An innovative tradition of First Nations science fiction has emerged around the world in recent decades. While older works in the genre imagined nightmarish scenarios of reverse colonisation featuring invading aliens – think H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – First Nations science fiction has looked to an all-too-real history of invasion to generate its nightmarish scenarios.'  (Introduction)

'Elizabeth Bryer’s From Here On, Monsters is a genuinely exciting debut from an Australian writer. This novel is playful, allegorical and formally ambitious, qualities that lend it a distinctly international flavour, in the way of Peter Carey’s early work. (Notably, Bryer has previously produced English translations of Spanish-language novels.) And, like Carey’s work, From Here On, Monsters has something urgent to say about contemporary Australia.' (Introduction)

'A woman hitchhiking alone through the Australian outback: it is a scenario that has been used as fodder for many horror stories. It is also the scenario of Kathryn Hind’s debut novel, Hitch, which introduces readers to the vulnerable Amelia, hitchhiking outside Alice Springs, armed with a backpack, an almost-empty bottle of water and her dog, Lucy. It soon becomes apparent that the alarmingly ill-equipped Amelia isn’t particularly invested in her own survival.'  (Introduction)

'Why are dystopias more popular than utopias? The growing genre of cli-fi, for instance, is almost universally pessimistic, and the TV phenomenon of The Handmaid’s Tale will continue to air its nightmares in a third series. And why, even when we imagine a utopia, does it typically slide into a dystopia? Think of Minority Report and Jurassic Park, in which a vision of an ideal world – where crimes are solved before they are committed, or where dinosaurs are brought back to miraculous life – quickly degenerates. Of course, this storytelling trope is hardly new: it can be traced back to Genesis, and the tale of Adam and Eve. Narratives of human failure, of corruption and greed, of promise going to seed, are foundational to Western culture.' (Introduction)