AustLit

'Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seated personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties — Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn’t fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew.

'At turns joyful and heartbreaking, Stone Fruit reveals through intimately naturalistic dialog and blue-hued watercolor how painful it can be to truly become vulnerable to your loved ones — and how fulfilling it is to be finally understood for who you are. Lee Lai is one of the most exciting new voices to break into the comics medium and she has created one of the truly sophisticated graphic novel debuts in recent memory.' (Publication summary)

'A brilliant new ‘right now’ resource that aims to assist emerging practitioners, artists and cultural workers better engage with community-based projects.

'The breadth of the advice shared in this non-academic, practitioner-led book includes insights into the ethics and logistics of working in community contexts – from collaboration and leadership to platforming and duty of care.

'Featuring 20 curated chapters from thought-leaders across the arts, cultural and community sectors, this unique publication is a must-have resource for community-engaged practice.

'Contributors include Genevieve Grieves about working in First Nations contexts; Caroline Bowditch on access and disability; Dianne Jones, Odette Kelada and Lilly Brown on racial literacy; Ruth De Souza and Robyn Higgins on cultural safety in the arts; as well as Esther Anatolitis, Adolfo Aranjuez, Paschal Berry, Lenine Bourke, Tania Cañas, Rosie Dennis, Alia Gabres, Eleanor Jackson, Samuel Kanaan-Oringo, Fotis Kapetopoulos, Kate Larsen, Lia Pa’apa’a, Anna Reece, Daniel Santangeli, and Jade Lillie herself.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'What is ‘experimental nonfiction’? Like all nonfiction writing it is steeped in facts, in real events, and in real people, with the aim of communicating information, argument, and truth. It differs from traditional nonfiction in that it tries to convey its meaning using unorthodox form, or style, or voice, or point-of-view, or approach, or method. The very best pieces of experimental nonfiction are those in which any unorthodox element adds richly to the meaning and authenticity of the subject matter – to the point that it would be difficult to imagine the piece being successful without the experimenting.

'Dizzy Limits collects the very best examples of the above mentioned experimental nonfiction from our most intellectually ambitious and creatively curious writers. Dizzy Limits includes pieces that explore: the body and its relationship to the world; climate change; the connection of First Nations people to land; trans motherhood; leeches; computers pretending to be humans; and so much more – and all in truly dazzling and unexpected ways.' (Publication summary)

'A creative non-fiction graphic work, blending memoir, pastiche and satire to interrogate the machinations that uphold and enforce political power in society. It’s about shame and call-out culture, misogyny and feminism, class antagonism and corporate power – all situated within my firsthand experiences. It’s an artistic response to political issues pertinent to Western societies, including activism in local communities and the corrupt practices of elected institutions and officials.'

Source: Publisher's catalogue.

'Vietnamatta is a collection of autobiographical fiction, nonfiction and criticism that explores life in and around post-gangland Cabramatta, a suburb in Western Sydney. It includes pieces on Flannery O’Connor, hardstyle, The Fast and the Furious , Carly Rae Jepsen, and bitter melon, each and all of which interrogate how aesthetic taste, trauma, love, desire, and culture are shaped by broader questions of class, race, masculinities, and geography.'

Source: Publisher's catalogue.

'A glorious expansion of her winning piece from the 2018 Prize for Experimental Nonfiction, Big Beautiful Female Theory is an illustrated lyric essay that binds slogans, memoir, history, poetry, fiction, critical theory, pop culture, fat theory, art criticism, sex and a befuddling procession of acronyms to defy the ways in society polices, manages, and dehumanises bodies.'

Source: Publisher's catalogue.

'In Gunk Baby, we join Leen just as she opens an ear-cleaning and massage salon at the Topic Heights Shopping Complex. Soon she starts to notice increasingly odd behaviour around her, and also it seems that managers of other stores are being killed off. In nonstop prose, Gunk Baby takes aim at orientalism and the Zen movement, violence, fashion, and middle-class boredom.'

Source: Publisher's catalogue.

'When One Person Dies The Whole World Is Over is a quietly enthralling and keenly intimate work about the search for meaning in the everyday, and what it might mean to belong. A record of a year of a life, When One Person Dies The Whole World Is Over is an attempt to pin down time, to capture the most beautiful and fleeting moments that we tend to rush past.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In 2017 the queer and gender-diverse community of Australia undertook an incredible campaign of everyday activism around marriage equality. As individuals and collectives we shared our personal stories with our networks – from social media, to workplace to school playground. We purged our tears and our rage – documented as poems, articles, photos, short stories, status updates, tweets, blog posts, political cartoons, and short videos. Many of us were shocked at the vitriol directed at us, to our faces, in our letter boxes and online, even in ‘secret’ Facebook groups. Many of us were hurt by the unspoken tensions and the conversations we couldn’t have with some of our nearest and dearest. By the end, we were truly exhausted.

'Yes, the vote was for equality. Yes, the legislation went through. Yes, we can get married now. But many of us have been left wondering whether it was worth it. Many of us are living with the ongoing grief of having our lives, and those of our children, be up for public debate.

'Whether you are ‘gay, straight, black, or white’—or beyond reductive binaries—this edited collection guides the reader through the highs and lows of the marriage equality postal vote. Combining serious scholarship, humour, manifestos, and simple tales of childhood, readers are flung into the emotional melting pot that constitutes a definitive turning point in Australian queer histories. These feelings are sticky and sometimes traumatic, but there is also catharsis in this compilation. This is also a counter-archive, one that consciously amplifies some of the voices that were drowned out by dominant campaigns, including those that questioned the value of marriage as a patriarchal institution or resisted the ‘we are just like you’ discourses that obscured complex families and queer ways of loving.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The past shapes the present – they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes?  Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past – ours, our family’s, our culture’s – wields in the present?

'Stories are not enough, even though they are essential. And books about history, books of psychology – the best of them take us closer, but still not close enough.

'Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic is a boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, reportage and meditation. It takes as its starting point five axioms:

• ‘Give Me a Child Before the Age of Seven and I’ll Give You the Woman’
• ‘History Repeats Itself…’
• ‘Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It’
• ‘You Can’t Enter The Same River Twice’
• ‘Time Heals All Wounds’

'These beliefs—or intuitions—about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live. 

'Axiomatic is Tumarkin's fourth book of non-fiction, and her most pioneering. Her three previous books, Otherland  (2010), Courage  (2007), and Traumascapes  (2005), have each and all been critically acclaimed and shortlisted for major prizes.

'More than seven full and long years in the making, and utilising her time as a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow, Axiomatic actively seeks to reset the non-fiction form in Australia.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Monk lives in Chinatown with her washed-up painter father. When Santa Coy—possible boyfriend, potential accomplice — enters their lives, an intoxicating hunger consumes their home. So begins a heady descent into art, casino resorts, drugs, vacant swimming pools, religion, pixelated tutorial videos, and senseless violence.

'In bursts of fizzing, staccato and claustrophobic prose, this modern Australian take on the classic hard-boiled novel bounces you between pulverised English, elastic Cantonese and the new dialect of a digitised world.

'Tip over into a subterranean noir of the most electronic generation.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Inspired by horror fiction, myths and fairy tales, Apple and Knife is an unsettling ride that swerves into the supernatural to explore the dangers and power of occupying a female body in today’s world.  

'These short fictions set in the Indonesian everyday—in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns, on dangdut stages—reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. Sometimes wacky and always engrossing, this is subversive feminist horror at its best, where men and women alike are arbiters of fear, and where revenge is sometimes sweetest when delivered from the grave.

'Mara finds herself brainstorming an ad campaign for Free Maxi Pads, with a little help from the menstruation-eating hag of her childhood. Jamal falls in love with the rich and powerful Bambang, but it is the era of the smiling general and, if he’s not careful, he may find himself recruited to Bambang’s brutal cause.  Solihin would give anything to make dangdut singer Salimah his wife – anything at all.

'In the globally connected and fast-developing Indonesia of Apple and Knife, taboos, inversions, sex and death all come together in a heady, intoxicating mix full of pointed critiques and bloody mutilations. Women carve a place for themselves in this world, finding ways to subvert norms or enacting brutalities on themselves and each other.' (Publication summary)

'Community radio host Ciara receives dozens of unmarked cassette recordings every week and broadcasts them to a listenership of none. Ex-musician Tom drives an impractical bus that no one ever boards. Publican Jenny runs a hotel that has no patrons. Rick wanders the aisles of the Woolworths every day in an attempt to blunt the disappointment of adulthood.

'In a town of innumerable petrol stations, labyrinthine cul-de-sac streets, two competing shopping plazas, and ubiquitous drive-thru franchises, where are the townsfolk likely to find the truth about their collective past – and can they do so before the town disappears?

'Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town follows an unnamed narrator’s efforts to complete a book about disappeared towns in the Central West of New South Wales. Set in a yet-to-disappear town in the region—a town believed by its inhabitants to have no history at all—the novel traces its characters’ attempts to carve their own identities in a place that is both unyielding and teetering on the edge of oblivion.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Island Will Sink is set decades from now - a not-too-distant future which is not so different. The energy crisis has come and gone. Cities have been rethought and redesigned, and EcoLaw is enforced by insidious cartoon Pandas and their armies of viral-marketing children. Max Galleon is a filmmaker of immersive cinema, a father to two children distressed by the world around, a distant husband, a brother to a comatose mystery man, and falling rapidly in love with a doctor who is not what she seems.'

'The Island Will Sink is a terrific postmodern science fiction novel in the vein of Michel Houellebecq and Phillip K. Dick, and marks the official breakthrough of a compelling literary talent.' (Source: Booktopia website)