AustLit

'This essay examines Bela Li’s Argosy, Max Ernst’s collage novels and China Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris in relation to an ideology of realism in which the recuperation of avantgarde praxis stands in direct relation to its de-sublimation of an aesthetics of sur-realism. In Li and Miéville’s solicitation of Ernst’s texts, among others, there is a deep ambivalence between the economy of a return to the origin as avant-primitivism and its affordances as (fundamentalist) reaction, in which the antipodeanism of Li’s refiguring of Surrealism describes an exemplary movement. Such antipodeanism also implies a critique of the somewhat paradoxical observation that, “As for the productions of peoples who are still subject to cultural colonialism (often caused by political oppression), even though they may be progressive in their own countries, they play a reactionary role in advanced cultural countries” (Debord, “Report on the Construction” 20).'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A photographic and poetic tribute to the 1966 album, East Broadway Run Down, by saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins–a recording which ended a period of intense productivity following the release of Rollins' landmark, The Bridge, in 1962 and preceding the tenor great's second extended sabbatical from the music industry. This book retraces Rollins' steps from Williamsburg Bridge down New York's East Broadway on the Lower East Side, following a path Rollins took for two years in his search for the "piece of music that was going to explain it all to me." ' (Publication summary)

'A decade-by-decade portrait of 20th century Australia through the prism of one family. Abacus is a portrait of the "end times," of generational violence and the instinct for survival.' (Publication summary)