AustLit

'A. S. Patrić’s The Butcherbird Stories aims to unsettle. Each story plunges the reader into a unique scenario, enhanced by the author’s penchant for beginning in medias res. Further discombobulating the reader, the stories often experiment with voice, milieu and structure. However, the work may be thematically organised by an interest in masculine violence, and in liminal states that hover somewhere between the rational and irrational.' (Introduction)

'An Open Book is the fifth book of poems published by David Malouf in the past decade or so, and it is perhaps not surprising that Malouf, now in his 80s, has returned to poetry rather than continuing to labour on novels. In one poem in this collection, “Sunday Afternoon”, he presents himself as a man whose life is in “Sunday mode. The mind / idling on automatic with no need / to be occupied or coloured, having come at last / to the end”. As this suggests, An Open Book is marked by an elegiac tone. Words such as “silence” and “breath” are common, and “blessèd” (diacritic intact) appears twice.' (Introduction)

'Ambelin Kwaymullina and Ezekiel Kwaymullina are a sister-and-brother team of Aboriginal writers who come from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Catching Teller Crow isn’t their first collaborative effort, but it is their first young-adult novel. A fusion of ghost story and crime thriller, it also combines poetry and fiction to striking and exciting effect.' (Introduction)

'Angela Meyer’s first novel, A Superior Spectre, is a superior ghost story. It is a tale of two protagonists, a 19th-century Scottish woman and a 21st-century Australian man, who come to haunt each other, thanks to a pseudo-pharmaceutical that transports the contemporary narrator through time and space into the woman’s consciousness.'  (Introduction)

'Antidote to a Curse, the first novel of the Maltese–Australian James Cristina, is an ambitious debut. It is excitingly difficult to classify. It is an erotic story and an international mystery. It is a celebration of Melbourne – with references to the Stalactites Greek restaurant on Lonsdale Street and the Arts Centre spire – while also being global. It brings together prose and poetry, writing and music, dream and waking experience. It is also simultaneously a novel and an imaginative reflection of how that novel came to be written.' (Introduction)

'Poetry and comedy meet in Ali Whitelock’s poetry collection and my heart crumples like a coke can. As in a stand-up routine, these poems offer sharp social observation, frankness played for laughs and nourishing doses of swearing. And as with the best poetry, they refresh our language, pay homage to tradition as the generative source of art, and surprise and delight as wit slides into beauty or pathos. The effect of the defamiliarisations and transformations of both comedy and poetry can be invigorating. The reader receives a double shot of revitalisation here.'  (Introduction)

A review of Small Wrongs (Hardie Grant Books, 2018)

'Flames, a first novel by the Tasmanian Robbie Arnott, begins with a protagonist, Levi McAllister, observing his mother returning from death, her waist trailing a “peacock tail of vegetation” and her head adorned with “cascading fronds of lawn-coloured maidenhair”. Such reincarnations are common among McAllister women who have been cremated and who, as the narrative comically describes, “all had their own reasons for returning – unfinished business, old grudges, forgotten chores”. Determined to prevent his sister Charlotte from returning when she dies, Levi undertakes the construction of a casket for her, even though she is still young and healthy. Charlotte flees, triggering a surprising story with a definite feminist edge.'  (Introduction)

'Gregory Day, like Tim Winton, is an Australian novelist connected with an Australian place. While Winton writes about Western Australia, Day’s points of reference typically lie along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. Like his earlier work, Day’s latest novel also seduces readers to think more deeply about the area’s famously picturesque landscape and its towns, such as Barwon Heads, Breamlea, Split Point.' (Introduction)

'This new story collection by the Indonesian-born Intan Paramaditha uses horror as a vehicle for representing the experiences of women living in patriarchy and for expressing feminist anger. The results are both unsettling and intoxicating. Often revising fairytales, the stories are reminiscent of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, though the direct manner of narration resembles the narrative style of Haruki Murakami, who also has a penchant for the Gothic.' (Introduction)

'In our era of climate change, prophecies about our future are commonplace. Scientists are our key prophets nowadays – though they are often repudiated or betrayed, like the religious prophets of old – but writers also increasingly offer their prognostications. Dyschronia, the third novel by the Australian writer Jennifer Mills, is another contribution to the future-oriented genre of cli-fi or climate-change fiction. Future gazing is also thematised by Mills’ novel.' (Introduction)

'It is hard to read Fiona Wright’s new collection of poems, Domestic Interior, without her award-winning and much-publicised essay collection, Small Acts of Disappearance, in mind. That book dealt with Wright’s eating disorder and Domestic Interior notably abounds in references to food. Food appears in similes: “Older sisters were round and brown / as hard-boiled eggs” (in the poem “Commute”); “my hands grow thick and lumpy / as air-cured salami” (in “Surely”). Food is also in titles – “Sweet Potato”, “Pudding” – and in allusions to cafeterias and bakeries. And there are poems in the form of charms, such as “Charm Against Casual Cruelty”, which lists various ingredients, precisely measured: “a small green chilli, an eggshell / a peanut, a wheat husk”. Indeed, all the poems in this book are skilfully measured and disciplined.' (Introduction)

'If your problem with rap is that you can’t hear the words – or you think you won’t want to – Omar Musa’s new poetry collection Millefiori might change your mind. Musa is a Malaysian-Australian rapper, with two solo records, but he is also an accomplished novelist – Here Come the Dogs was longlisted for the Miles Franklin – and the author of two earlier poetry books.' (Introduction)

'Some of the most exciting, tonally ambitious and uncompromising fiction that has been published in Australia in recent years has come from Aboriginal authors – most notably, the remarkable Waanyi writer Alexis Wright and the extraordinary Noongar writer Kim Scott. A new novel from the multi-award-winning Scott is something to take seriously. '  (Introduction)