AustLit

'Suzie Miller is a multi-award-winning playwright, whose one-woman play Prima Facie – after earning plaudits for Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company – was staged in the West End, starring Jodie Comer, and won a Best New Play Olivier Award. Prima Facie ran on Broadway this year and Miller is adapting it into a film, but it has also found its way into the form of this novel.' (Introduction)   

'Nadine J. Cohen’s debut novel, Everyone and Everything, brings together the drama of a young woman’s breakdown with comedy reminiscent of Woody Allen or Nora Ephron. Anxiety, for instance, “arrived without warning and then wouldn’t leave. Like the Kardashians.” Cohen manages the balancing act of her dramedy through the appealing cipher of her first-person female narrator, Yael Silver, who is neurotic and genuinely tested by life, but also spirited and well-dressed.' (Introduction)   

'Dementia has been in the spotlight in recent times, largely because an ageing population has made the disease unignorable. Indeed, we have seen the labelling of a new generation – the “sandwich generation” – to recognise a cohort of middle-aged people caught between caring for their growing children and their ageing parents. Cynthia Dearborn’s The Year My Family Unravelled is a personal account of the challenges of caregiving for the elderly, though in Dearborn’s case she finds herself sandwiched between two countries, Australia and the United States, and two phases of her life, the functional one of her present and the dysfunctional one of her childhood.' (Introduction)   

'While the terms ‘romance’ and ‘novel’ are entangled at their origins, romance novels have been traditionally disparaged as formulaic and frivolous, feminine and anti-feminist. Nevertheless, romance is the most popular genre in the world. Harlequin reportedly sells two books every second. In recent times, scholars have given the genre serious attention.' (Introduction)

'The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for short fiction, is now open and closes on April 24, with total prize money of $12,500. In this week’s ABR Podcast, we feature Maria Takolander’s story ‘A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry’, which won ABR’s short story competition in 2010, the year before it was renamed the Jolley Prize. It is one of the best-read features on ABR’s website, which hosts content going back to 1978. ‘A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry’ is an artful take on academic intrigue and absurdism. Maria Takolander’s story appeared in the December 2010–January 2011 issue of ABR. Listen to Maria Takolander reading her story thirteen years later.' (Production summary)

'Trauma is often said to be unspeakable. There are various reasons for this. Pain and shame are silencing, as are implicit forms of censorship (of the kind scorning trauma literature, for instance) and explicit injunctions against speaking (from perpetrators, enablers, or the law). But it is also the case that trauma doesn’t inhere in language. Trauma lives in the limbic system, which is that of the fight, flight, or freeze response, and which is necessarily more immediate than language processing. After all, when your life is under threat, it’s not words you need, but action.' (Introduction)

'Umberto Eco once described the text as a ‘lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work’; to contribute, in other words, to the production of meaning. Poetry has a particular reputation for being demanding, but Tracy Ryan’s tenth poetry collection, Rose Interior, isn’t challenging in the way that Eco envisages. It is less about engaging readers in the masculinist energy of the ‘machine’ and ‘work’ than about inviting them into a feminine world of domestic spaces and quotidian phenomena. If a reader were to conceptualise the text in the way that Eco describes, the engine for Rose Interior might be located in a poem called ‘Request’, where the poet announces her interest in whatever is

'little and liminal,

won’t take much space, the odd
moment you think of ...  / or don’t,

whatever you wouldn’t look twice at ...'(Introduction)   

'Sunbathing might sound like a relaxing holiday read but it is in fact an absorbing study of the grief of a nameless young woman who has lost her father to suicide. Isobel Beech makes apparent how complex grief can be in these circumstances and does so with an authority grounded in personal experience. Beech has acknowledged the autobiographical foundation of this book, which is written in first person and reads just like a memoir. Yet Sunbathing is subtitled “A novel”.' (Introduction)

'The “Tasmanian Gothic” may have been identified back in 1989, but it seems there’s still something haunting Tasmanian fiction. From Richard Flanagan and Carmel Bird to Danielle Wood and Robbie Arnott, Tasmanian writers continually demonstrate a bent for the fantastic. What Fear Was, a debut collection of short stories by Ben Walter, ostentatiously leans towards the uncanny.' (Introduction)

'The essay, if you haven’t noticed, is having a moment. It’s as if, in the age of the Anthropocene, as we face the end of the world as we know it, reality has finally become too real for make-believe. Delia Falconer’s Signs and Wonders is a collection of essays on subjects as diverse as gum trees and the decline of the paragraph, but its overriding imperative is to confront the reality of climate change. Exactly how it is to be confronted is a problem we all face. Falconer’s essays aim for a sophisticated mixture of reportage and philosophy, with healthy doses of outrage and despair.' (Introduction)

'Researchers have shown that the less you know about something the more you think you know. There is even an apparatus for measuring this correlation between ignorance and confidence: the Dunning–Kruger graph.' (Introduction)

'This paper explores the connection between the mask and fiction writing. Freud has theorised the identifications of writers and readers with the masks of literary personae, but my interest in this essay is with how the mask of a narrator or character can function uncannily to impede identification. I am also interested in research emerging from neuroscience, socobiology and robotics, the last of which has drawn attention to the ‘uncanny valley’, an affect generated by cybernetic beings that deny – by virtue of their mask-like faces – the neuronal mirror activity fundamental to human identity. Both Freudian and emerging scientific research provide the context for the question I ask here: how might we understand the affect generated by a fiction writer who uses the uncanny mask of a narrator or character to refuse opportunities for identification and to elicit, instead, an uncanny crisis in subjectivity within the reader? To answer this question, I employ a hybrid autoethnographic methodology that recognises the primacy of feeling when it comes to the experience of the uncanny and that acknowledges my own compromised position as a writer invested in such unfriendly or sadistic affects.' (Publication abstract)

'Trigger Warning is not for the fainthearted, but neither are the elemental realities of domestic violence and environmental catastrophe that these astonishing poems address. Comprised of three sections, the first summons a difficult personal history by conversing with poets – from Sylvia Plath to Anne Carson – whose dramatised confessions trigger Takolander’s own. The second part remains focused on the domestic, while redeeming that scene of trauma through a reinventing wit. The final section of this extraordinary book turns its attention outside, playing with poetry itself in order to confront the Anthropocene and the final frontier of death. This is poetry that balances ruthlessness and lyrical beauty; poetry alive to its time and audience; poetry not to be missed.'

Source : publisher's blurb