AustLit

'There's this awareness you sometimes come to in a still life class. Let me explain. It begins workmanlike: sketch in the shapes, block in the tones and colours. After a while you switch to a smaller brush, add highlights, blemishes, the finer points. Still, it does not look quite real. So you pay closer attention to the path of the light, the violence of the shadow - the intricate dance of reflection and refraction, moving all around you, so fast as to appear still. And now your subject is not the fruit, but the dance of that light's motion - rebounding off the taut skin of a pear, swooping through the shadowed hollow of the bowl below and back up again. Suddenly even something as ordinary as an apple seems too much to articulate, too detailed and alive. But if you hadn't tried, you would have only ever seen a bowl of fruit...' (Introduction)

'Daily, I watch my friends enact rituals of control and augmentation. They negotiate personae, attempting to embody the imagined desires of imagined people. I take part in similar rituals. I oscillate between veganism and vegetarianism. I obediently strip my face of its oil and drench it in a different oil, from a little bottle, like a rebirth. I online window shop for Miu Miu dregs, dresses that would make me look like a doll. I struggle to disentangle these habits and disciplinary choices; vanity, art and environmentalism become difficult to tell apart. To witness these acts of control and reorganisation is to reach for the same questions again and again. Can you worship beauty from a place of love, from some kind of divine and transcendent space? Or must it erupt from a place of punishment, disgust, self-flagellation? Is beauty a kind of surrender, or is surrender the opposite of a commitment to beauty?' (Introduction)

'A part of me is feeling nervous, so i ride around in the back of the bus for a while. My bare, dirty (oh so dirty) feet are pulled up onto the plastic seat. I birdwatch the late-night people. Where did you come from? Why did this story choose you? What does your 'about the author' page say? I wonder about them. (Please let them wonder about me.) There is a Miss Lonelyhearts looking out the window and mumbling to herself. There is a boy and a girl kissing up the front. they are both beautiful. I imagine myself as the girl. I squeeze my eyes shut and pinch my thigh. Wake up, you miserable freak!...' (Introduction)

'The evening breaks with song. A woman wrapped in a shawl sits at a piano, adjusts her webcam on its mantle, and begins to play. Her chords drift into digital space, a space which yields the bandwidth to hold even the deepest waves of grief. As much as language can ostracise those who do not understand, Melanie Hsu's vocalising at her piano follows a cadence all can comprehend. She sings free of words.' (Introduction)

When we hit Emu Plains, the sky falls open and the horizon fizzes blue. Heat reverberates across the land. The Big Smoke dissipates behind us. (Introduction)

'My final in-patient rehabilitation clinic was situated just a block away from the beach. Occasionally, my partner would take me to the waterside cafe early in the morning, when the light was still soft and grey and my scheduled day of therapy had yet to begin. I would try and match my jagged, imperfect breathing to the soft cadence of the tide. I imagined my heartbeat falling in sync with the rhythmic ebb and flow of the ocean. The salted breath flooded my veins like a painkiller. I was hypnotised by the inexorable motion, the reliable inhalation and exhalation of a giant pair of lungs. I imagined the scars on my head were thin, glittering lines of salt that marked the places the tide had touched. Later, two more lines of salt would precipitate on my chest, below my reconfigured pectorals.' (Introduction)