AustLit

'Melina Marchetta’s latest novel opens in a downpour lasting “forty days and forty nights”, establishing a sense of providence that runs through The Place on Dalhousie. While a rural town floods with sorrow, blow-ins Rosie Gennaro and Jimmy Hailler have a fling, bonding over their own sadness: Rosie “loves broken people who damage her in return”.' (Introduction)

'The Yabba, 1971. My genesis is a panorama of nothing on some faraway blasted plain where the closest thing to life is the way vision warps in the heat. I’d be lying if I were to tell you I remembered anything before this desolation. Who is at home nowhere? This isn't a riddle, it's a failure of imagination.'  (Introduction)

'She’s a writer whose plays have been widely lauded by critics but largely neglected by the mainstream. Now Patricia Cornelius’s work will take its place on the main stage. “It sounds so hifalutin, but my ambition was really just to be able to create great work … that I felt soared. It never entered my mind that it would happen in the mainstream.'  (Introduction)

'Jean-Luc Godard idly swirled a spoon in his coffee. Baz Luhrmann was very late and Jean-Luc Godard, now on his third Caffe Americano, was starting to get jittery. Around him, the world began to disappear. All he could see were bubbles roiling on the pitch-black liquid's surface, a galaxy of turbulent constellations reflecting back his troubled mind.'  (Publication abstract)