AustLit

' In 2005 I met Kriss Hades, guitarist for one of the most extreme metal bands in the world, at a Wolf Eyes concert in the Newtown RSL on Enmore Road. Seated in the poker machine area a floor below the Music, he and his girlfriend approached my table and asked for a cigarette. Maybe it was a beer. He seemed very drunk, and his girlfriend seemed annoyed. "You know he lives in a dungeon, right?" she blandly offered at one point. I didn't believe her because I didn't think dungeons existed anymore. After all, what is a dungeon?'  (Publication abstract)

'By the fifth page of Wayne Macauley’s fifth novel, Some Tests, the title is already a kind of refrain. Or at least the words – some tests – recur and resonate with a vague, tuneful importance. By the novel’s middle section it becomes an ominous chant, like the phrase that punctuates a nauseating chorus. Protagonist Beth Own, a middle-aged nurse with two young daughters and an accountant husband hellbent on costly renovation, is instructed by her locum doctor to take ‘some tests’, and then ‘some more tests’, and then some ‘proper, rigorous tests’. And it seems that she will go on taking these tests, and learning of the need for even more tests, with scarcely the time to wonder what the tests are about or what they could mean. She can only suspect that there is something critically wrong with her. And although only a ‘lethargy and general unwellness’ has befallen her, it seems, sometimes, during her journey towards more and more tests, that she might even die.' (Introduction)

'Community radio host Ciara receives dozens of unmarked cassette recordings every week and broadcasts them to a listenership of none. Ex-musician Tom drives an impractical bus that no one ever boards. Publican Jenny runs a hotel that has no patrons. Rick wanders the aisles of the Woolworths every day in an attempt to blunt the disappointment of adulthood.

'In a town of innumerable petrol stations, labyrinthine cul-de-sac streets, two competing shopping plazas, and ubiquitous drive-thru franchises, where are the townsfolk likely to find the truth about their collective past – and can they do so before the town disappears?

'Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town follows an unnamed narrator’s efforts to complete a book about disappeared towns in the Central West of New South Wales. Set in a yet-to-disappear town in the region—a town believed by its inhabitants to have no history at all—the novel traces its characters’ attempts to carve their own identities in a place that is both unyielding and teetering on the edge of oblivion.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The new coffee table was an event. It was meant to be a prized relic...'

''Erica From Sales' is about a person who becomes the chief songwriter and lyricist behind the music of the Pet Shop Boys in order to access hidden regions inside of songs.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'John Drivens is expelled from a strange clinic. He walks for many hours and encounters a shopping centre in a suburb he has never heard of. Thought dead, he tries to make contact with his former acquaintances on public internet terminals.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.