AustLit

'Les Murray has always been a sort of enigmatic double-headed eagle: one profiled eye looking into the past, the other staring into the future.'  (Introduction)

'Kristina Olsson’s novel about the construction of the Sydney Opera House is an appropriate book to launch Scribner Australia, a new imprint of Simon & Schuster. The book is gorgeously designed, with elegant endpapers, a gleaming dust jacket and stylish layout: a declaration that serious literary fiction is worth being serious about. And it’s appropriate because Olsson’s novel – whatever its flaws – is eloquent about bringing new complex things into the world and about how grand aesthetic enterprises can sometimes catalyse broader change, inspiring great dreams and heightened sophistications.'  (Introduction)

'Tom is a young man in need of a spiritual guide and a personal trainer, someone to rehabilitate his damaged self-image and bring down his half-marathon time. Enter Coach Fitz. This guru in a yellow legionnaire’s cap is an exceptional long-distance runner and a former psychoanalyst. She’s also full of strong opinions about the many ways in which young men are led astray.'  (Introduction)

'The new issue of Griffith Review is about the perennially newsworthy subjects of immigration and multiculturalism, and the lead essay by James Button and Abul Rizvi is essential reading. It offers a concise but clear-eyed account of our nearly total dependence on skilled immigrants for continued economic prosperity and challenges our leaders to break with the decades-long habit of undermining public debate about the implications of this dependence.'  (Introduction)

'Sharon Kernot’s fourth book contains many sweet, darkly beguiling set pieces, which evoke in their way a sense of the beauty that can be seen in nearly anything living or dead.' (Introduction)

'Traumata is about many things. It’s about a dimly recalled sexual assault by a paedophile neighbour. It’s about an absent father, an abusive stepfather and a neglectful mother with what sounds like borderline personality disorder. It’s about rape. It’s about being groped by a much-admired uncle. It’s about heroin and speed and paranoia and thoughts of suicide. It’s about broken relationships and a long parade of therapists.'  (Introduction)

'Australia’s contribution to the Second Gulf War has not proved a fertile subject for literary fiction. Of the 75 books nominated for the Miles Franklin Award since 2003 there’s almost nothing about Iraq, Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction.' (Introduction)

'Australian novelist Gail Jones is no great spinner of yarns or master of mood and atmosphere, but she does have a unique feeling for the fascinations of the fragmentary. Her books brim with literary allusions, historical anecdotes, references to scholarly oddities and intriguing quotations, and when all else fails she can always charm with the glitter of so many carefully arranged details and luminous curiosities.'  (Introduction)

'In her poem “Simply Yarning”, Charmaine Papertalk Green writes:

'Yarning is a beautiful conversation / From that moment / That space / That time / Yarning puts us on common ground.

'Her co-author John Kinsella responds warmly with his own hymn to the art of yarning:

'How can I but take up the call, / Charmaine, and yarn right back at you / – it’s what we do when we connect, / have a yarn about this and that.' (Introduction)

'The Shepherd’s Hut is the outrageous story of a headlong bolt through the remotest outback by a charismatic gun-toting teenager determined to reunite with his girlfriend half a continent away. It’s Winton’s 29th book and the closest thing he has written to a full-dress action-adventure thriller.' (Introduction)

'It begins, this mesmeric inward spiral of a book, with a digressive turn towards the past: Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece...; (Introduction)

'Alex Miller is a gifted writer whose most compelling books – Journey to the Stone Country, for example, or Autumn Laing – have a simplicity of vision, an earthiness and poignancy, an integrity and grace few can match. How surprising and disappointing then that his new novel, The Passage of Love, is such a shambles: slack, unshapely and disheartening.' (Introduction)

'Pippa used to be Narelle when she lived up north with her mum. She changed her name the day she turned 18 because she was convinced that no one named Narelle could ever win the Booker. And Pippa desperately wanted to win the Booker. She still does. For as long as she can remember she has wanted to be a writer – a successful writer.' (Introduction)

'It begins with the Maid of Orléans, history’s most charismatic female hero, languishing in an English dungeon. Great ladies glide through and brutish guards hurl abuse, but none suspect her secret: the warrior virgin who led an army and changed the course of history has loved – and been loved in return.' (Introduction)

'Harriet McKnight’s debut novel is a rather bleak and dispiriting portrait of two women on the verge of nervous breakdowns, and of a world on the verge of environmental catastrophe.'

'Ouyang Yu’s fifth novel is a fictionalised retelling of the life of William Edward “Billy” Sing, a Chinese-Australian soldier who achieved fame as a crack-shot sniper at Gallipoli. It’s also a dark and somewhat unhinged work, full of wild diatribes, grotesque visions, bitter jests and facile word games.' (Introduction)

'Ruby J. Murray is the grandniece of Arthur Boyd and she has written an attractive, slender novel about an obscure but very great painter and the young biographer who creates the artist’s posthumous reputation. This is a book where lurid family secrets and harrowing personal histories become the keys to the apprehension of the life’s work and illuminate its significance. It’s also about one artist who discovers herself by writing about another.' (Introduction)