AustLit

'Sarah Holland-Batt discusses her poetry collection The Jaguar with fellow author Emily Bitto.'

'A breathtaking new novel from the Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays.

'In the fall of 2011, a heartbroken young man flees Australia for the USA. Landing in the excessive, uncanny-familiar glamour and plenitude of New York City, Will makes a vow to say yes to everything that comes his way. By fate or random chance, Will's journey takes him deep into the American heartland where he meets Wayne Gage, a fast-living, troubled Vietnam veteran, would-be spirit guide and collector of exotic animals. These two men in crisis form an unlikely friendship, but Will has no idea just how close to the edge Wayne truly is.

'Wild Abandon is a headlong tumble through the falling world of end-days capitalism, a haunting, hyperreal snapshot of our own strange times. We read with increasing horror and denial as we approach the cataclysmic conclusion of Will's American odyssey, dreading what is galloping towards us, but utterly unable to look away.

'This lyrical and devastating new novel from the Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays offers us startling and profound visions of the world and our place in it.' (Publication summary)

'Barrie Kosky’s peripatetic career has led him to work throughout Australia and Europe, before finally establishing a true connection with Berlin. Still, for the Melbourne-born theatre and opera director, nothing says “home” like a rehearsal room. “It just happened that theatre discovered me, and performance and music discovered me, because the very same time that I started to think, ‘Who am I? How does this relate to me?’ and felt that disconnectedness, was the very same time I was experiencing music: Mahler symphonies or puppet shows or musicals or opera. And it was very linked.'  (Introduction)

'On the eve of the release of his directorial debut, Acute Misfortune, adapted from Erik Jensen’s book about artist Adam Cullen, Thomas M. Wright talks about how his reaction to Cullen turned from revulsion to deciding he was the perfect subject. “Adam seemed to stand for so many things that I just can’t. And I think, particularly, cloaking that behaviour and those attitudes behind a veil of art is just fucked.”.' (Introduction)

'The opening scenes from The Lebs could be mistaken for speculative fiction, in which ethnic minorities are forced into guarded enclaves, surrounded by high fences and barbed wire, and monitored by surveillance cameras. But Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s second novel is closer to social realism: it is set within the surreal banality of Punchbowl Boys High School in Sydney’s western suburbs and narrated by Bani Adam, a young Lebanese-Australian man struggling to find his place in the world.' (Introduction)

'Known as a fearless documentary filmmaker, Eva Orner has shone a light on tragic situations in Iraq, Kabul and Nauru. In her latest work, she turns her attention to the problem of mobile phones. ‘If I think it’s compelling, important, interesting, worthwhile, that overtakes everything else.’'

'On her first day of school, Lily Struthers meets Eva, one of the daughters of the infamous avant-garde artist Evan Trentham. He and his wife are attempting to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930s Australia by inviting other like-minded artists to live and work with them at their family home. As Lily’s friendship with Eva grows, she becomes infatuated with this artist colony, longing to truly belong to this makeshift family.

'Looking back on those years later in life, Lily realises that this utopian circle involved the same themes as Evan Trentham’s art: Faustian bargains and terrible recompense; spectacular fortunes and falls from grace. Yet it was not Evan, nor the other artists he gathered around him, but his own daughters, who paid the debt that was owing.

'The Strays is an engrossing story of ambition, sacrifice and compromised loyalties from an exciting new talent.'

Source: Publisher's blurb. (Sighted: 30/1/2014)