AustLit

'Tom, our narrator, is a stranger in an intellectual community whose members experience the world by wondering how things are made and how they might be made differently.

'Instead of characters undergoing dramatic changes, Tom's life in this world is defined by the changing plans for these things- objects that might help people overcome injuries, virtual reality experiences that induce profound nostalgia about memories, ambiguous and ordinary robots, and failed services intended to replace the function of mirrors. Tom's job is to tell stories about the work going on in this intellectual community and to look for the unacknowledged storytelling that is already part of the world. Many of the stories Tom hears and observes involve types of people called clients, consumers and designers - all figures who in this story are bound together by the common thread of trying to make visions and aspirations tangible.

'Tom listens and watches people pour their practical and imaginative energies into plans for thing-projects and in the process gives centre stage to a pervasive but oddly inconspicuous aspect of what it means to be human in the world today' (Publication summary)

'The car helped enable the suburb to become a widespread landscape format, thereby blurring the previously discrete conceptions of the town and the country. Portable computing technology is having comparable, if yet-to-crystallise effects on the places people live, play and work. Particularly those of us engaged in the so called knowledge economy. We already have the neologism ‘coffice’, a designation that names the practice of people adapting cafes for the purpose of work. But this is just one example of a place—or really two places—being remade through the affordances of mobile computing. The home/office binary is a relatively crude rendering in comparison.' (Introduction)

'Tom Lee’s first novel is about a young jogger who is in a relationship with an older woman. She is both his coach and his mentor. Coach Fitz, as he calls her, seeks to instil a philosophy of running which combines ‘controlled intensity’ with a curiosity about places and their histories. A country boy, he is fascinated by the landscapes of the city beaches and parks through which they travel. And he has his own obsessions – with exercise routines, ancestral legacies, outdoor gyms, horse-racing, weather conditions and inner-city eating habits. Then, suddenly, their relationship falls apart, over the issue of sex – and he becomes a coach and mentor in turn, to a young man this time, as he attempts to orchestrate an ideal expression of his emotional, athletic and intellectual urges.

'Coach Fitz is an exploration of the outdoor mentality that plays such a dominant role in the Australian psyche. It is remarkable for its observations about landscape and physical exercise, embedded in the training routines and dialogues of the runners. But most of all it is about the emotions and aspirations of youth, and the complications these engender.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Antidotes only exist out of necessity, given against something already present, already acting upon the body. Without the danger that calls them into action, they may hold no value for us—but when we need them, we need them desperately. This one-off series is designed to have antidotal properties, by collecting and dispatching a sustained chord of lighthearted positivity, written against a cultural moment that overwhelms and frightens and covfefes us daily. ‘A light when all lights are out’, ‘a welcome reprieve’, a cute story that plays at the end of the news telecast featuring the baby elephant at the zoo: these are some of the ways we describe such instances where the pressures upon us are alleviated, when we can avoid thinking about the gloomier realities of this life. But we wondered, what other kind of meaningful comforts might be possible? A writer friend recently spoke about the need to capture moments of levity—especially when working with subject matter that might be brutal or traumatic—moments that, however small, offer respite and a provisional hope.' (Introduction)