AustLit

'As an explanation of how authors and individual texts are received and responded to over time, American critic Harold Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence” is as old as this ­reviewer and far more durable.'  (Introduction)

'The most celebrated World War I memoirs tend to have been written by junior infantry officers. They include Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Siegfried Sassoon’s fictionalised Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Edmund Blunden’s superb Undertones of War.' (Introduction)

'Melburnians have a peculiar fondness for their grunge, an affection (or possibly affectation) that is perhaps unmatched in our other capitals.' (Introduction)

'In The Orchardist’s Daughter — the fourth novel for Canberra-based writer and veterinarian Karen Viggers — we find ourselves in a small timber town in southern Tasmania. Tasmania is also the setting for Viggers’s second novel, The Lightkeeper’s Wife, which made her a literary sensation in France, with more than 500,000 copies sold.' (Introduction) 

'“We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-­remembered song …” It’s impossible to ignore Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Virgin Suicides when reading Felicity McLean’s debut novel, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone. The title itself is a nod to the trope of missing young women that so haunted the works of Joan Lindsay and Jeffrey Eugenides. Though cognisant of these influences, McLean’s book sings its own song.'  (Introduction)