Alex Gerrans Alex Gerrans i(10218698 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Brothers Our Troubles Are Alex Gerrans , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2024;

— Review of The Director and the Daemon Pitaya Chin , 2024 single work novel

'The Director and the Daemon is the right book for a time when the world is both unbearably grotesque and slapstick. A TV director is offered funding for another season by a company that runs Australia’s off-shore detention centres. The director is in love with their inscrutable star who won’t stick around if there’s no new season. An activist group stalks and bashes fossil fuel associates. The daemon (an activist) is getting wrecked by intra-group politics, with state violence circling ever closer. But author Pitaya Chin moves too quickly to linger in smug cleverness; everything smashes together in a big smear. The problem of climate fiction is solved because it’s climate realism now, baby! Scores of people die in a ‘wet-bulb event’. The western suburbs are cordoned off so its inhabitants can’t seek cooler pastures in high heat, and a centrist politician asks why a military cordon wasn’t instated sooner. Does this remind you of anything?'(Introduction)   

1 Best of 2023 in Australian Reading Alex Gerrans , Rosie Ofori Ward , Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen , Imogen Dewey , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2024;

— Review of Shirley Ronnie Scott , 2023 single work novel ; Praiseworthy Alexis Wright , 2023 single work novel ; Search History Amy Taylor , 2023 single work novel ; Green Dot Madeleine Gray , 2023 single work novel ; Songs for the Dead and the Living Sara Saleh , 2023 single work novel ; Notes on Her Colour Jennifer Neal , 2023 single work novel ; Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens Shankari Chandran , 2022 single work novel ; Crossing the Line Nick McKenzie , 2023 single work autobiography ; Anam André Dao , 2023 single work novel
1 The Novel (As Haunted by the Listicle) Alex Gerrans , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2023;

— Review of Green Dot Madeleine Gray , 2023 single work novel
1 Chained Upon the Face of Time Alex Gerrans , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2023;

— Review of The In-Between Christos Tsiolkas , 2023 single work novel

'The In-Between is Christos Tsiolkas consciously yoking himself to Australian literature in a historical sense. It begins with an epigraph from Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, another novel by a gay Australian writer which is about time and change more than it is about the relationship between two people, even if it is anchored by their marriage and the making of a homestead on stolen land in New South Wales. This slipping of self and time is exactly where Tsiolkas’s novel locates itself.' (Introduction)

1 Right Now and Not Later, Baby Alex Gerrans , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2022;

— Review of Everything Feels like the End of the World Else Fitzgerald , 2022 selected work short story
1 Return and Repeat : The Limits of Writing Trauma in the Colony Alex Gerrans , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin , June vol. 81 no. 2 2022; (p. 217-220) Meanjin Online 2022;

— Review of Lies, Damned Lies Claire G. Coleman , 2021 single work autobiography
1 Blood Don’t Lie : Writing Sickness After Flannery O’Connor Alex Gerrans , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , vol. 25 no. 2 2021;
'“Blood don’t lie” is a work of creative nonfiction that seeks to understand writing and sickness through the work of Flannery O’Connor. By analysing her correspondence, biographical details, ephemera and three short stories, this essay applies a feminist disability studies reading to her work and asks: to what extent can the experience of sickness be read “backwards”, from biography to fiction; from reading to reader; and, in the case of both O’Connor and the author, from generation to generation? It identifies the thematic concerns of her work – family, time, sickness and body – and emphasises how they might be employed to counter the resistance of pain to description in language and, further, to explain the relationship between language, power and otherness in writing about sickness. By combining techniques from literary criticism, biography and autobiography in a hybrid form, it produces new writing towards a speculative literature of sickness.' (Publication abstract)
1 The Study Of Form, The Naming Of Things Alex Gerrans , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , Summer vol. 78 no. 4 2019; (p. 9-11)

'The instructions on the seed packets are clear. Damage the seed with sandpaper, cover with boiling water for a day, plant singly and cover with wood ash. It’s a simulation of a fire. The seed is a couple of millimetres long, dark, with the beginning of a root dry at its side, as long as the seed itself. I imagine its unfolding: the pale root extends, the cotyledons open. Compare these to basil or lettuce seeds, tiny specks that must be sown shallow into moist earth and covered in about a millimetre of dirt.' (Introduction)

1 The Whole World Is Blood Temperature Alex Gerrans , 2017 single work short story
— Appears in: Voiceworks , Autumn no. 107 2017; (p. 63-68)
'A cousin turned sausages on the barbecue. The sausages hissed in the heat, spat grease...' 

 (Publication abstract)

1 Tracker by Alexis Wright Review – a Weighty Portrait of a Complex Man Alex Gerrans , 2017 single work column
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 29 November 2017;

'Biography of Indigenous activist Tracker Tilmouth from the Miles Franklin award-winning novelist is a testament to the power of collective storytelling.'

1 Highway Kind Alex Gerrans , 2016 single work essay
— Appears in: Voiceworks , Spring no. 105 2016; (p. 17-20)

'Nan is driving me to school because Mum lost her licence for drink driving. It's my first year of high school. She's tired from taking care of me and my cousin. Starting to forget things. Around the corner from school she rear-ends the car in front of us. The bonnet of the car crumples. Her teeth fall out into the footwell. I get out of the car. Blue fluid is leaking onto the ground underneath it. She refuses to get out until she finds her teeth. I insist I am fine to go to school. I get to my locker and start to cry a bit. A pretty girl from my class hugs me in the way you hug people you don't know very well and I choke out 'car crash' when she asks what happened. I start taking the train to school.' (Publication abstract)

1 Some Kind of Anthropocene : The Island Will Sink Alex Gerrans , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , September 2016;

— Review of The Island Will Sink Briohny Doyle , 2016 single work novel
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