AustLit

'It’s a putting oneself into a space of deliberate uncertainty. Stepping into the unknown. A practicing in that space. Training. It’s about thinking provisionally. Speaking small. Not for all.

'It’s about languaging. Being attentive to words, to meaning. To the meaning that can be smuggled in however unwittingly.

'It’s about taking seriously – which might have nothing whatsoever to do with being serious.'  (Introduction)

'Just in time for the latest lockdown, ABC Arts is trialling a monthly book column. Each month, we'll present a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange — alongside freelance writers and book reviewers. This month, we're thrilled to present recommendations from Declan Fry and Khalid Warsame.' (Introduction)

'Yuwaalaraay author Nardi Simpson’s debut novel, Song of the Crocodile, begins with a vision of the sign welcoming visitors to the country town of Darnmoor, “the Gateway to Happiness”. “The sign taunts a fool into feeling some sense of achievement, that you have reached a destination at the very least,” writes Simpson, before continuing: “Yet … Darnmoor itself is nothing.”' (Publication summary)

'Set in an unnamed country that has recently undergone a violent coup, Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron is a novel of a land suffused with wild animal magic: a heron that can create vast storms; a species of squid whose ink has miraculous properties and must be harvested through sanguine ritual. Ren, seeking to escape the world, has for the past half-decade made her home in a small, wild corner of this place. Soon, though, her isolation is disturbed by a group of soldiers led by the charismatic and ruthless Lieutenant Harker. The soldiers are on a search for a rain heron, thought by many to be a myth. Harker, sensing that Ren knows more than she’s letting on, begins a campaign of terror; her coercion of Ren takes the form of strategic despoliation of the wilderness – Ren’s home. Ren is shocked by the soldier’s callousness: “Ren had seen the way she stalked around the mountain, unmoved by the trees, the air, the staggering slopes and the cellophane streams, the huge and harsh beauty of it all. For Harker, the mountain was no different to a car park, an office, the bottom of the ocean; she would use it, take what she needed, burn it down, dance gracefully in the ashes and never think of it again.”' (Introduction)

'Google has this handy and terrifying feature called Timeline, which shows you everywhere you've ever been, how many times you've been there, and how long you've been there each time. It collects data from your phone, constantly if you have an Android, and if you have an iPhone, it logs your location every time you open the Google Maps app. Nothing disappears: your every movement is a collection of data points, fed into algorithms that use this information to do everything from alert you to traffic jams in your area to notify you when you're running low on nappies for your newborn.'   (Publication abstract)

'The cultural historian and essayist Maria Tumarkin once described an essay as “a dramatisation of a writer’s mind at work”. Ender Başkan’s A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man, though a novel, takes this dictum as its primary motivating force.'(Introduction)

'In critical appraisals of Tony Birch’s fiction, certain adjectives appear again and again. Of the prose: “spare”, “concise”, “uncluttered”; the characters “vivid” and rendered with “compassion”. Perhaps it is true that good novels, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are all alike, yet it could just as easily be true that critics, by and large, tend to repeat themselves. Or perhaps, as I suspect, there’s an element to Birch’s writing that makes him both readable and difficult to define.'  (Introduction)