AustLit

'Anthologies such as Kill Your Darlings’ New Australian Fiction have a long and necessary prehistory. In continental Europe and Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “little magazines” were established to showcase writing that disobeyed the public taste – then as now – for mass-market fiction published by large commercial concerns.' (Introduction)

'Sally Olds’s essay collection, People who Lunch: Essays on work, leisure & loose living, deals primarily with worlds, or subcultures, on the margins of society. Each holds within it a kernel of hope for a different way of living: club culture with its embrace of hedonism and rejection of living-to-work; cryptocurrency’s promise of financial returns outside state-regulated markets and wage labour; polyamory’s attempts to break free of the stultifying nuclear family unit. None, however, has managed to pose any serious threat to the existing order and most have come to live comfortably within or alongside capitalism.' (Introduction)

'Fiction and dreams have a complicated, even toxic, relationship. Fiction is already a simulation of reality, with varying degrees of fidelity to The Real; and likewise, the process of reading, much like dreaming – and indeed writing – involves a theatrical envisioning of images in the mind. But dreams are maligned as narrative devices. Henry James’s fin-de-siècle advice – “tell a dream, lose a reader” – is aggressively ignored in print and on screen where, in the hands of plot-minded dramatists, dreams are no longer the anarchic spontaneities of the unconscious. Rather, they are tamed and subdued in the service of advancing plot or revealing character, and thus lose the allure of the uncanny.' (Introduction)

'Dr Joëlle Gergis is an esteemed Eureka Prize-winning climate scientist and one of the co-authors of the current Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She is also the author of Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (2018) and Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope (released last month). She is a frequent media commentator, urgently describing the crisis facing Earth and the emotional cost to the scientists who confront it more closely than most of us.' (Introduction)