AustLit

'Michelle Law is a prolific writer, working across stage and screen, whose biggest achievement is in telling the stories of an unrepresented migrant experience. “A lot of people would come out and be like, ‘I’ve never seen a story that I could relate to in that way’ and ‘That was me growing up’ or ‘That’s me now’.” ' 

'The education of the artist, especially if that artist is a young male, is the perennial grass of the literary field: a yearly recurrence, reassuring if often a little dull. Must we really hear again of the sensitive soul who finds himself in a homosocial world without sympathetic allies? Who longs for connection with women without having the first clue about doing so? Whose aesthete’s impulses place him at odds with family, religion or caste?' (Introduction)

'The centrepiece of Skin in the Game is an account of an interview with Helen Garner almost 40 years ago. Sonya Voumard, then an 18-year-old cadet journalist, chose Garner as her subject for a university assignment. The interview was convivial and frank – so frank that Garner was shocked when she read the finished piece. “It is always traumatic to see the way another person has perceived you,” she wrote to Voumard, “especially when you feel you have talked a little too freely …” If Garner “learnt a lesson” from the experience, so did her interviewer – although it would take more than 30 years and a second interview with Garner, reappraising the first, to grasp fully the ways in which the disjunct between journalist and subject can leave the latter “slightly pulled askew” (and not just on the page).' (Introduction)

'This new story collection by the Indonesian-born Intan Paramaditha uses horror as a vehicle for representing the experiences of women living in patriarchy and for expressing feminist anger. The results are both unsettling and intoxicating. Often revising fairytales, the stories are reminiscent of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, though the direct manner of narration resembles the narrative style of Haruki Murakami, who also has a penchant for the Gothic.' (Introduction)