AustLit

'SHE is half-asleep when she dresses to walk her dogs to the local park in the dim morning sunlight. Wandering together through the cold, damp grass, they stumble upon something dreadful. This experience rocks the woman out of her habitual actions and everyday rhythms. Dog Park draws us into an unsettling contemplation of the murky lines between the living and the dead.'  (Publication summary)

'Why must we be good at things in order to enjoy them? After years of struggling with perfectionism and self-sabotage, I want to give myself space to breathe.'

'I am sitting in a café in North Melbourne adjacent to the hospital. It’s filled with older people anticipating or denying or recovering from the usual bodily attrition, sporty-looking medical staff with lanyards drinking long blacks, and people on break from day-programs in street clothes trying to blend in. These are people with enough money to sit in a café and eat something and to dawdle while doing it, not worried about = being asked to leave. A very limited inner-city melting pot, in other words, of which I, on my laptop typing this essay, am a part.' (Introduction)

'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 Imperfect Lee Kofman dissects her life-long relationship to the scars on her body. She tells of the calamities that scarred her: a haphazardly administered heart operation in the Soviet Union when she was ten years old left her with ugly scars on her chest; a week later she was run over by a bus, leaving her leg stippled by scar tissue. She traces her relationship to her own scars and to a multitude of secondary texts; she interviews other people about their experiences, seeking to understand how what she terms our ‘Body Surface’ moulds our lives. Disentangling her flesh from metaphor in an effort to study her relationship with it, to redefine its paradigm beyond tired axioms of self-love. ‘Reality is messy, way messier than is possible to sum up in manifestos of pop-psychology advice,’ she writes.' (Introduction)

'‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’ is a visual poem that is deliberately referential, opening up conversations and foregrounding the notion of writing into certain traditions: those that are given to us and those that we choose.'  (Introduction)

'Like a smoke alarm that plays “I Believe In Miracles” by Hot Chocolate while your house burns down.

'Like a greased up stripper pole for use in emergencies, only.

'Grills slices up figures of history, autobiography and speech, in a delightful springtime bloodbath for famously evil and evilly famous women-dead or alive, young and old. Burn your house down, poison your whole family, shoot your lovers point blank: just read this book before you do.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.