AustLit

'As a child, whenever I wanted to impress family friends I would ask them if they wanted to hear me count to one hundred in less than two seconds. They would smile and nod, and my immature understanding of facial expressions would interpret their ‘I’m humouring you’ face as ‘awed confusion’ and ‘preparing to be blown away’. I would pause for dramatic effect, take a deep breath, and then go “One, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, a hundred!”. I’d then laugh, because I had totally tricked them, and laughing at your own jokes is a good way to win friends.' (Introduction)

'Ageing out. Expiring. Voiceworks death. Here on EdComm, we’ve got a lot of euphemisms for the tragedy of leaving the Voiceworks fold and stepping onto the ice floe of the adult literary world — aka, turning twenty-five.' 

 (Introduction)

'I sat in the waiting room and tried not to stare. There were fresh flowers on the reception desk, beautiful purple orchids, and a girl in her twenties sitting behind them, her face hidden by a giant flatscreen. Bubbles of air rose in the water cooler and light filtered through windows that if I stood at would let me gaze down on Treasury Gardens, eleven floors below. There were no magazines on the tables, the edict being that the staff would not stock them and none of us were allowed to even so much as bring in a morning paper. So we all sat on wooden minimalist chairs and tried to avoid each other's lines of sight. Some of us you could recognise in the same way you recognise distant family at a belated function, not so much by name as by a voice or the vague contours of a familiar face. It has you whisper involuntarily to your sister or husband, now ex-husband, even though the person's right there just two tables away. Whisper about whose husbands left them, whose teenage sons had already fathered children, whose daughter's stomach had once been pumped to bring up over-the-counter Panadeine. You don't mean to be horrible, but that's all you can recall...' 

 (Publication abstract)

'In Myeongdong, Seoul's major tourist shopping district, the streets are replete with K-pop's synthesised sound. Store after store blasts largely auto-tuned vocals and drum machine beats, rap interludes and intermittent English lyrics - all the obligatory staples that make K-pop irresistibly catchy. Outside, it's a scene eerily reminiscent of Western pop music's late-'90s peak. Advertising is relentless. Giant faces of idolised groups on billboards loom over the streets that house life-sized cutouts rising every few metres. They beckon you into various stores stocking the soft drinks, sports shoes, reading glasses and hand creams they endorse. Pair these with socks emblazoned with your favourite bandmember's face while you eat at the fried chicken restaurant sponsored from the same person. K-pop's sheer saturation is, and indeed will continue to be, a phenomenon.' (Publication abstract)

'This one time I told my producer friend about an idea for a reality TV show. It would be called "Car-Compactor" and one lucky audience member would get to choose whether or not to press a button, and that button would cause a person and their car to get crushed by a compactor. But here's the thing: they would have to make their decision based purely on the car's custom number plate. And after the crushing, the show would talk to all the crushed person's friends and family, and see if they thought their colleague deserved to be crushed. If the general consensus was that they did deserve such a fate, then the button presser would win...' (Publication abstract)

'Before 1966, true crime was largely unheard of. Then came the Clutter family, and Truman Capote's infamous exploration of their murder. In Cold Blood is seen as a pioneering work in the formation of the true crime genre, coming in second as the highest selling true crime book in the history of publishing. Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, chronicling the Manson murders, is first.' (Publication abstract)

'In bushland off a highway a three-pronged track leads to an old gum, a cliff, and a riverbank. A fog has wafted in through the trees. The leaves, numb and frosted, snap one by one, falling to rest amongst the bark chips and ants. The clouds settle at knee-level as the fog's fingers create an ethereal playground. No holidaymakers are expected to visit the park this week. No tourists should click lenses and capture filtered light through branches. No families should disturb the mist with treks and picnics. However, when the park ranger steps out of the hut and into the car park, he finds it near full...' (Publication abstract)

'Venting on the internet is awfully handy. As much as any other decent rage outlet - punching pillows, playing violent sports, yelling at loved ones - the internet's diverse proliferation of ventspaces allows us to move past problems without having to find the resources to tackle them head on. When used in moderation, and managed appropriately, cyber-rage provides folks with an effective short-term coping mechanism; a cathartic, diffusive rage surrogate. But unlike hastily-scrawled, Sharpie-penned lavatory graffiti, online tags often have a broader reach than one intends or remembers. Tweeting angrily about problems - or tweeting angrily about irrelevant things rather than dealing with said problems - can sometimes be more analogous to punching a pillow full of bees.' (Publication abstract)

'The first lie came easy and large, like a gobstopper falling wet from my mouth. It came out of nwhere during a lunch break. I told them my family owned an enormous farm with many horses and trees. I was eleven, and had recently arrived at a new school. The girls I'd befriended had mostly been lifelong friends, and they'd developed a weird and intimate ritual of discussing their parents properties (plural). "Does your dad still have the beachside place?" were not words I'd ever heard before and I didn't know what to make of it. "Yes," was the response. "Prices around there are skyrocketing."' (Publication abstract)

'Ariel is on the couch, her big, veiny arms wrapped around the Filipino, who says his name is Jimmy Deeeen. The kid's got a gap in his teeth the size of a fucking fist, and his hair is dyed the colour of piss, and he says he's heading from here to Hollywood. His shirt's two sizes too small, and the kid is fucking tiny. Ariel didn't say where she found him, and I couldn't give a single fuck. She's always bringing in chumps like this, spitting them out and picking the leftovers from her teeth...' (Publication abstract)