AustLit

Cars, sex  outback pubs and facing up to a harrowing history. There's a lot on the road in Peter Carey's new novel, as he explains to Stephen Romei.

'The burgeoning of social media has forced a rapid transformation in how life writing nego­tiates the public and private. American writer Maggie Nelson describes public performances of intimacy that may be “fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous or steamrolling or creepy”. It’s hard to evade the recording eye: phone camer­as, security footage, online commentary.' (Introduction)

'A few months ago our teenage daughter sat down to dinner wearing large hooped earrings. “What’s with the gypsy earrings?” we asked.A lively interchange followed, concerning the ideological soundness of the word gypsy. All a normal part of living with a politically sensitised millennial: but it wouldn’t have occurred to any of us that there was a substantial group of people in Australia that this issue affected directly.Mandy Sayer’s thorough, affecting, if slightly eccentric, exploration of the lives of Australian Roma reveals a long history and an idiosyncratic culture that largely has faded from view in the present era.' (Introduction)