AustLit

'Chris Womersley’s Ordinary Gods and Monsters is a hybrid novel made with familiar parts. It’s a new iteration of Womersley’s suburban Aussie nostalgia found in his earlier novels, The Diplomat (2019) and Cario (2013), and interspersed through his collected short fiction, but this time the stage is an unnamed Australian town with a tight-knit and thinly veiled criminal underworld. The novel operates comfortably within conventions, deploying several familiar narrative elements (an abusive alcoholic father, a drug-dealing underbelly, self-absorbed and wayward teen narrator, a mysterious death) to create a coming-of-age story with shades of crime fiction.' (Introduction)

'Fiction and dreams have a complicated, even toxic, relationship. Fiction is already a simulation of reality, with varying degrees of fidelity to The Real; and likewise, the process of reading, much like dreaming – and indeed writing – involves a theatrical envisioning of images in the mind. But dreams are maligned as narrative devices. Henry James’s fin-de-siècle advice – “tell a dream, lose a reader” – is aggressively ignored in print and on screen where, in the hands of plot-minded dramatists, dreams are no longer the anarchic spontaneities of the unconscious. Rather, they are tamed and subdued in the service of advancing plot or revealing character, and thus lose the allure of the uncanny.' (Introduction)

'For Steve Toltz, everything, even death, is a joke. His third novel, Here Goes Nothing,is an afterlife satire for a disenchanted secular world. The protagonist Angus Mooney, an atheist, wakes up after being murdered to find his ‘sneering contempt for the supernatural’ confronted by evidence to the contrary. The title reveals itself as a pun: the ‘nothing’ that ‘goes’ is eternal oblivion.'(Introduction)

'In Scott McCulloch’s debut novel Basin, an aimless nomad called Figure traverses an interminable landscape that feels similar to the impossible staircase in Escher’s lithograph Ascending and Descending. Figure roams the territories bordering the Black Sea, forever moving onwards and forever circling back onto himself. His wayward journey recalls a bad dream: “I feel I’m a ghost who’s wandered into the odyssey of a lunatic,” he reflects.' (Introduction)

'In her debut memoir, Muddy People, Sara El Sayed records her teenage years growing up in Australia as an Egyptian–Muslim migrant. Sara’s parents, both professionals, fled Egypt’s percolating economic and political instability and moved to Queensland, where they were forced to reaccredit themselves while taking a hotchpotch of jobs to keep the family afloat.'  (Introduction)

'In his new novel, Ghost Species, James Bradley walks the tightrope between ideas and entertainment, revisiting a theme that has dominated his writing of late: the possibility of Earth’s environmental ruin.' (Introduction)

'In 1961, at the age of 31, Kenneth Cook released his first novel, Wake in Fright, which remains his most renowned work. In the book, John Grant, a schoolteacher assigned to a tiny town in rural Australia, misses his flight home to Sydney and finds himself stranded in the fictive mining town of Bundanyabba (‘‘The Yabba’’).' (Introduction) 

'A literary gang is forming. It is made up of writers outside of mainstream White Australia recording their experience of living under its dominion. This new wave is characterised by political urgency and has bloomed alongside, or from within, the identity politics movement.' (Introduction)

'Often, short story collections seem arbitrarily composed. They can feel tossed together in an ersatz attempt to be coherent while not adhering to an organising principle that makes them whole. Which says nothing about the quality of the stories in isolation, but is instead an observation of the lack of textual cohesion that plagues so many short-fiction collections.'  (Introduction)

'For many years, books have documented the literary rivalries of writers—Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, A. S. Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble—but Gabrielle Carey’s novella length book Falling Out of Love with Ivan Southall (2018) is the first I’ve read to examine what happens to somebody when they lose faith in the writer who convinced them to become one in the first place. Many of its most interesting elements exist in its story architecture, a part-memoir of Carey’s writing life, part-biography of Ivan Southall that critiques his novels and career. To call his career a legacy, however, may perplex contemporary generations of readers and writers, for whom the name rings no bells. For modern readers, his reputation and writing has truly faded into obscurity. By his death in November 2008, Southall was essentially forgotten: “although mostly unread and unknown to young people of the present generation, in the 1960s and 1970s Ivan Southall was a literary superstar.”(Carey; p6) During his prime he produced over thirty books for children and was the only Australian to be awarded the Carnegie Medal. How, then, does Australia continue to suffer from this cultural amnesia?' (Introduction)

'On 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires ravaged Victoria and ended the lives of 173 people. At the site of the fire that started in Churchill, a town in the Latrobe Valley, detectives found evidence suggesting it was intentionally ignited. Not far from the site, they discovered ‘a sky-blue sedan parked at an odd angle by the grass verge of Glendowald Road. The car looked to have stopped suddenly’. As the detectives gathered witness reports, they heard that during the bushfire, an unusual man was spotted wandering through the blaze, carrying in his arms a tiny dog. The results from the sedan’s plates return, and they discover it is owned by Brendan Sokaluk, a LaTrobe Valley local. From there, The Arsonist, by Chloe Hooper, proceeds in three parts—The Detectives, The Lawyers, and The Courtroom—and ends with the conviction of Brendan Sokaluk.'  (Introduction)