AustLit

'Towards the end of Son of Sin, the narrator – a now adult Jamal Khaddaj Smith – relates a memory of ‘telling some story of his life’ to friends ‘like Adam or [his housemate] Dan’. His friends respond to his story ‘with mingled disbelief and wonderment, saying, Your life is like a soap opera – because there were too many characters, too much death, nothing at all like the kind of spare, elegant novels they studied in school’. ' (Introduction)

'It is difficult to overvalue the currency of modernism right now. Over the last decade, a plethora of scholarly writers have addressed modernism’s imperial legacies and in so doing have extended its geographic and temporal boundaries. Contemporary writers such as Tom McCarthy, Zadie Smith, Sophie Cunningham and Jack Cox have also engaged in varied ways with modernism’s aesthetic and revolutionary bequests. Michelle Cahill’s debut novel, Daisy & Woolf, is preoccupied with Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of a Eurasian character, Daisy Simmons, in Mrs Dalloway. ' (Introduction)   

'Have you ever been really stoned with a complete stranger and even though, even in your heightened state, you know that everything that’s happening is just a bit of fun, there’s something so deeply off-putting about watching this stranger become unmoored from themself in front of you that you begin to panic? Consider the following passage from Hydra, Adrianne Howell’s debut novel, in which the protagonist, Anja, alone and unravelling in her secluded beachside property, prepares to take herself out on the town:...' (Introduction)   

'In the middle of a Sydney winter at the turn of the century, Alain Badiou scrawled a message in a copy of Being and Event (1988): ‘For Melissa, in friendship, and in memory of a very dense and very happy trip to Sydney’. The book didn’t exist yet in English; its author was virtually unknown outside of France. At the time—in the late 1990s—only a handful of Badiou’s works were available in English, the most notable being a critical commentary on Gilles Deleuze translated by the Australian philosopher Louise Burchill. So, what had brought Badiou to Sydney? Most immediately, it was Oliver Feltham. Feltham was a young Australian philosopher who had come back from Paris with a plan to bring Badiou to Australia. He contacted the Sydney-based philosopher Melissa McMahon, who helped arrange for Badiou to speak at the 1999 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy’s ‘To Be Done with Judgement’ conference. There Badiou delivered a paper on ‘The Part and the Whole’ and, on the conference’s final night, launched the English translation of Manifesto for Philosophy (1991). The launch, at Gleebooks, was poorly attended: a few diffident graduate students and academics milled about the bookshelves. A photograph from the event shows Badiou towering (he is very tall) and affectless, arms crossed, besides John Bacon, a logician from Sydney.' (Introduction)

'The title of Ann Vickery’s latest book of poems, Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack, is longer, more complex, and more avowedly academic than is conventional. A number of questions might be asked of it: are the bees metaphorical, being the most basic. In other words, are the bees human? That what ‘bees do [is] bother’ does not clarify, but rather thickens, the meaning of the first part of the title. Bothering seems like a human activity, and suggests, both semantically and sonically, the notion of a ‘bee in a bonnet’ (‘Bad Hat’): but while having a bee in your bonnet is not a passive image exactly, it does suggest being subject to the bee, of the bothering being done to the one with the bonnet, as opposed to being the bee that is doing the bothering.'(Introduction)