AustLit

'Gas Deities is the result of a quest for meaning that negates the big ticket items of ego, intellectual fashion and salvation, leaving behind the generative joys of doubt. Using dramatic monologues and the slipperiness of the lyrical I, Wright takes us on a journey through suburban Australia, with the odd overseas excursion, finding magic in the ordinary, and understanding the creativity of erring at the same time as mining the foibles of pretension.' (Publication summary)

'Grunge fiction in the 1980s and 90s featured young people living in grimy inner-city suburbs and ­colouring their discombobulation with drugs, booze and awkward or unfortunate sex. This kind of novel is no longer possible.' (Introduction)

'The growth of creative non-fiction that offers the reader the frisson of real experience has created interesting questions. Where does fiction end and non-fiction begin?' (Introduction)

'The contemporary literary imagination more and more figures the future as a place where quality of life is worse than it is now. Environmental catastrophe, climate change and now pandemics feature in the scaffolding we use to predict what the world beyond us will be like.' (Introduction)

'The seventh edition of the Griffith Review Novella Project is a literary degustation: seven short novellas leavened with palate-cleansing poetry by established poets such as Stuart Barnes, Stuart Cook and Sarah Holland-Batt, as well as emerging poets including Ella Jeffery and Daniel Swain.' (Introduction)

The Dizzying Heights, the seventh in Ross Fitzgerald’s Grafton Everest series, begins with Grafton examining his penis in the mirror through the lens of its (and his) senescence. It’s a curiously blunt self-examination, exacerbated by a failure of focus that provides a counterpoint for the far more whimsical satirical confection that follows, a political romp that thoroughly disavows itself of the restrictions of reality.' (Introduction)

'John Kinsella is best known for poetry that is often characterised as anti-­pastoral: the ecological underpinnings, the rootedness in the wheat belt of Western Australia, the postmodern aesthetic awareness. Rather than the celebration of humanised nature, Kinsella’s poems deal with the exploitation of the land and its consequences as well as the often anti-romantic lives of those on the land. It’s a poetry of silos and heat, trail bikes, drought and death.' (Introduction)

'Melburnians have a peculiar fondness for their grunge, an affection (or possibly affectation) that is perhaps unmatched in our other capitals.' (Introduction)

'Once an event escapes from living history its memories become open to confection. When these events are legends, in their loss of connection to actuality they can become vehicles for sentimentality or the mythic embodiment of values society chooses for points of self-identification. The Anzac legend is a classic ­example, of fortitude against the odds, against the stupid decisions of the brass, of mates standing up for mates, of the ­pragmatic know-how of the everyman trumping the pretensions of the nobs.' (Introduction)

'While the towns and villages of Europe emptied into cities for the burgeoning opportunities and exploitations of the industrial revolution, the romantics countered with celebrations of nature and the individual. Literature has been fascinated by the figure of the isolated self, surrounded by millions, ever since.' (Introduction)

'Stephen Orr is one of the key fictional chroniclers of South Australian life. While earlier novels such as Miles Franklin short-listed The Hands and One Boy Missing are set in the state’s bare country towns, This Excellent Machine is a homage to growing up in Adelaide’s lower middle class suburbs in the 1980s; a story of fibro, Datsuns, flaky men and enduring women set in Lanark Ave, Gleneagles, a fictional analogue of the suburb of Hillcrest.' (Introduction)

'Western Australia is experiencing a literary purple patch at the moment and Lois Murphy’s debut novel, Soon (Transit Lounge, 288pp, $29.99), is further evidence of this. Murphy, who lives in Melbourne now, spent six years travelling Australia in a homemade four-wheel-drive truck, and this novel about the stubborn last residents of an abandoned town is loosely based on the fate of Wittenoom, infamous as the site of Australia’s largest asbestos mine.' (Introduction)

'Thea Astley was one of Australia’s finest novelists. Her evocation of unusual and eccentric lives in our tropical north was unsurpassed, even if the conspicuous regionalism of her oeuvre may have moderated her posthumous place in the canons of Ozlit.' (Introduction)

'Riffing off authors such as Gerald Murnane, Shaun Prescott builds an idiosyncratic vision that is simultaneously banal and powerfully moving. The Town is the debut novel of this short fiction writer from the NSW Blue Mountains. The narrator comes to an unnamed NSW country town to work part-time while writing a book on the disappearing towns of central-western NSW. He finds share accommodation with Rob in a townhouse and a job stacking shelves at the local Woolworths.' (Introduction)