AustLit

'All of Helen Garner’s work is intensely personal. But diaries and letters are genres particularly charged with intimacy. On reading the Garner diaries, what came to my mind yet again was a statement from Janet Malcolm: ‘voyeurism’ is one of the impulses behind reading life writing (Malcolm 1994: 9).' (Introduction)

'‘Death is the great invigorator’ (21) writes the late Andrew McGahan in the first chapter of his last book, The Rich Man’s House. Racing against death in the final stages of pancreatic cancer, McGahan was composing a deathless tract which is not only ‘twice as long as most of [his] books’ (Steger 2019) but amplifies to epic proportions major motifs and interests from his earlier works, notably the opposition between man-made constructions and the forces of nature. Thus, the titular house he depicts is ‘the most expensive private residence in recent world history’ (77), built within a solid rock of Theodolite Isle and facing the Wheel, the highest mountain on Earth which rises 25 kilometres into the sky, ‘defying comprehension’ (87), piercing the stratosphere and generating its own extreme weather. Only one man has ever stood on top of the Wheel – Walter Richman, the owner of the extravagant house.' (Introduction)

'Claiming T-Mo is the debut novel from prolific speculative short-story writer Eugen Bacon. It details a mother’s determination to fight for the innate goodness within her son and her quest to release him from the debilitating and destructive grip of toxic masculinity. It is a narrative that spans planets and generations, is richly inventive in its use of language, and demonstrates the breadth and depth of Bacon’s extraordinary imagination.'

 (Introduction)

'Kathleen Mary Fallon is a multi-talented writer who has been playing with language and storytelling in poetry, stage plays, feature films, and prose since the 1980s. A fixed place: the long and short of story is a collection of short stories from across her career (and some never before published works), taking the reader on a journey through the deeply personal and messy lives of a variety of characters from contemporary Australia. The book nearly defies genre definition; it feels reductive to call it ‘a short story collection’, given that the tales swing and swoop so readily between prose, poetry, prose-poetry, scripts, song lyrics, and the occasional dreamlike dive into stream of consciousness, demonstrating Fallon’s ability to leap between genres and forms. The overall effect is a dreamlike adventure through the Australian landscape and through the many playful possibilities of language.' (Introduction)

'This is an old picture come to life. Colin Rogers’ From the Mallee is a snapshot of 1900s Australia bush life in five short stories, a loving evocation of a style of community life lost to contemporary culture flows, mass transport, and digital democratisation.' (Introduction)

'Christina Houen’s This Place You Know is a memoir. The book is in three parts, ‘Martha’s Story’, ‘Anna’s Story’ and ‘The Last Song’. It begins with a Prologue and ends with an Epilogue. The memoir of Christina’s mother, Martha, and Christina’s own childhood experiences are, by the author’s own admittance, drawn from archival records, her mother’s handwritten memoirs and her own memoirs. Much of Martha’s story is imaginative reconstruction of her thoughts and actions.' (Introduction)

'The Hard Seed by Mary Pomfret is an intriguing novel – a blend of mystery and philosophy with a fair dose of literary allusion and floral metaphor stirred into the mix. It soon becomes obvious that one is reading multiple narratives containing casts of similar, yet different, characters with seemingly overlapping stories and generally dysfunctional relationships, particularly within their family circles. The theme of the outcast, or the ‘black sheep’, is apparent as family members gang up to ostracize one of their flock who dares to examine and write about life, and who they fear will expose family secrets.' (Introduction)

'In the Hollow of the Land collects sixty years of poetry by Western Australian writer Glen Phillips in two volumes published by Wild Weeds Press. Glen Phillips was born in 1936 and the poems stretch from the author’s early 30s into his 80s. In terms of a career, it is notable that the production of poems by Phillips has tended to accelerate in the latter years, and has been particularly prolific since his retirement from Edith Cowan University in 2001. Taken together, the poems in In the Hollow of the Land provide a significant document of record not just of a sensibility that is responsive to his world, but of this world itself.' (Introduction)

'The Returns is something of a sequel to Salom’s Waiting (2017): both novels are set in a vividly evoked North Melbourne and both chart the evolving relationship of eccentric – if very differently classed – characters. The Returns cheekily acknowledges this connection when book-seller, Trevor, stares out of his shop and sees Waiting’s unforgettable Big and Little gazing straight back at him: Salom’s readers know who Big and Little are, and Trevor would too if he’d bother to read the copy of Waiting that resides on his shop’s shelves. Trevor is, of course, oblivious to the authorial joke he is sitting in. Overweight, about-to-bedivorced, limpy, and prone to gloom, this ‘mordant humourist’ (39) is too busy worrying about his post-marriage future. Then, Elizabeth appears. She is skinny, orthorexic, divorced, and a sufferer of prosopagnosia: she cannot recognise faces. She works-from-home as an editor and is looking for a lodger. Trevor soon moves in, befriends her equally limpy dog, takes over the cooking, and turns her shed into a studio: he wants to ‘fetch back’ his abandoned youth as a ‘wayward’ bachelor artist (59).' (Introduction)