AustLit

'Merciless Gods (2014) is Christos Tsiolkas’s only collection of short stories and arguably his least discussed work to date. Comprising stories that Tsiolkas published in various literary magazines and anthologies as early as 1995, Merciless Gods is persistent in its fixation on the relationship between queer desire, identity, and disgust. Throughout the collection, characters are frequently exposed to the bodily discharges that most of us tend to dissociate from, cringe at, and conceal from one another: sweat, semen, odor, and excrement. Characters also blurt out vile homophobic and racist bigotry in impulsive overflows of speech that bring about release and disgust at the same time. In this article, we read the spasmic (in all its forms) as a liminal space of joy and repulsion that constitutes what we call Tsiolkas’s politics of disgust. We argue that disgust is crucial to Tsiolkas’s deeply humanist and densely historical project, best exemplified in Merciless Gods in the ways that form—short fiction and the collection—arouses distinct feelings in readers that they cannot escape and that Tsiolkas’s work refuses to gloss over. In this way, Merciless Gods testifies to Tsiolkas’s compulsive return to fundamental questions of justice and distribution of misery and well-being.' (Publication abstract)

'From 1996 to 2002, the renowned Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas worked collaboratively with the Melbourne playwrights Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, and Melissa Reeves and the musician Irine Vela to write Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (1998) and Fever (2002) for the Melbourne Workers Theatre. While Tsiolkas’s prose work is the subject of extensive study, these collaborative and highly successful plays are largely ignored, despite their undisputed influence on the subsequent Australian theatrical canon and the light they shed on his broader oeuvre. In this article, we posit that these two theatrical works draw on Tsiolkas’s political rage to deliberately challenge Australians’ perceptions of class warfare by problematizing political ideology through the exploration of race and religion. A historical context of Australian playwriting is provided and positions Tsiolkas as a key contributor in bringing queer and immigrant experiences from the margin to the center of Australian stages. Tsiolkas’s key contributions to both theatrical works are discussed in detail, and the implicit calls for revolution in the plays are put in the larger context of his career and its political and social preoccupations, including the themes of his later, more commercial works. The authors’ arguments are framed in notions of Tsiolkas provocatively calling for a revolution within Australian national identity.' (Publication abstract)

'Drawing on theories and methodologies associated with the field of textual criticism and scholarly editing, as well as those associated with the field of book history, this article examines the publishing of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap in the United States. All aspects of the publication process are surveyed—including design, marketing, and screen adaptation—but this article devotes its greatest critical attention to the editorial process. Ultimately, it contends that reading a US edition of The Slap is a substantially different experience from reading an Australian edition. This groundbreaking argument is the result of several unique or rare critical decisions. This article is unique, firstly, in the scope of its examination of the publishing of an Australian book in the United States—considering editorial, design, marketing, and screen adaptation. Second, it is rare for its close analysis of a previously overlooked category of editorial variation between editions. Finally, this article is uncommon because its analysis of editorial variation is focused on a book that received editorial attention that is reflective of a contemporary industry standard, rather than an outlier case. What remains unknown, however, is how typical Tsiolkas’s The Slap is of US editions of contemporary books originally published in Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'The name Christos Tsiolkas may as well be a synonym for “controversial.” The term peppers most critical and popular articles about the writer’s work, such that what Zuckerman terms Tsiolkas’s “provocations” almost no longer bear comment. Yet for first-year students of Australian literature, such content may not be as commonplace as this discourse suggests. Indeed, the provocations of the Tsiolkas oeuvre, despite their affiliation with key genres and concerns of contemporary Australian literature, may prove too confronting or too overwhelming for the novice literary critic. This article maps a range of issues arising from the study of Tsiolkas’s work in a first-year Australian literature course at a regional university in Australia. With a particular focus on what is perhaps the author’s most controversial work, Dead Europe (2005), we consider why Tsiolkas’s narratives can be so difficult for literary studies students and outline how the use of reflective practice offers a safe space for engaging with such “triggering” work.' (Publication abstract)