Cirrus@Austlit

'Michael Sala’s second novel, The Restorer, approaches the experience of domestic violence from the perspective of two characters who endure and witness it. It can safely be called a topical novel, given the public interest in the issue over the last few years (see for instance the coverage here and here). The Restorer also revisits several of the themes that Sala explored in his superb fictional-autobiography, The Last Thread (2012). There, Sala portrays his relationships with two nasty paternal figures: Michaelis’ stepfather, Dirk, is often violent and threatens to kill him, while his biological father is sexually abusive and neglectful. Alongside this, Michaelis endures the precocious macho ferocity of his older brother, Con, and is witness to his mother’s relationship with yet another domineering man later in life.' (Introduction)

'On the cover of the latest edition of Meanjin, the mournful head of Frank Moorhouse gazes back at readers. It is a sad and sorry business, his expression seems to say. A grand old man of Australian letters is broke. ‘Is writing a way of life?,’ Moorhouse enquires. I don’t think I’m spoiling it by revealing that for Moorhouse, financially at any rate, writing is not.' (Introduction)

'In December last year, Malcolm Turnbull blasted the City of Fremantle for its bid to hold a Australia Day fireworks display and citizenship ceremony not on 26 January but two days later, in what the council promoted as a ‘culturally-inclusive alternative event.’ The council’s snub of the national celebration could not go unanswered. What, after all, is more culturally inclusive than Australia Day? Indignant, Turnbull threatened to revoke the council’s right to hold the ceremony. By politicizing the Citizenship Act, Freo council had sent the public an ‘anti-Australia Day message.’ Mayor Brad Pettitt saw off protests from local business groups (who let off their own fireworks) and the United Patriots Front (who went off at a rally), but at the eleventh hour bowed to government threats of prosecution. The alternative event went ahead—without fireworks or ceremony.' (Introduction)

'The shortlist for the 2010 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction included works by two world-famous writers, winners of an impressive array of local and international literary prizes. Yet neither Summertime, the third instalment of J.M. Coetzee’s fictionalised autobiography, nor Ransom, David Malouf’s radiant retelling of an episode from the Trojan War, won the award. The prize went to a lesser-known writer, Eva Hornung (formerly Eva Sallis) for a strange and strangely disturbing fable, Dog Boy, set in a decaying city haunted by feral creatures – both human and animal – which comes to be revealed in the course of the novel as present-day Moscow. Now, after a silence of some seven years, Hornung’s new novel reveals again her capacity to surprise, to follow a direction for which there is little precedent in her earlier work.' (Introduction)

'I want to talk about publishing and writing in Australia today. We have an old publishing industry that clings tightly to some of its early twentieth-century etiquette while dealing with a world in flux. Many of our evergreen habits are likely to be gone soon. We’ve spent years now debating the future of the book and what it might look like in e- and p- formats but we haven’t spoken about enough of the future, really, such as the sale or return policy we extend to our bookseller colleagues in the age of online selling. Or the advance/royalty system we conduct with our authors, 90 per cent of which is largely symbolic and an act of faith rather than a proper financial exchange after the first year or two. Thankfully, we’ve started to stop the waste of excess print runs so as to get unit costs down but that’s because the technology has improved.' (Introduction)

'Susan Barton tenders this provocation in a letter in J M Coetzee’s novel, Foe, when a strange woman, who claims to be her daughter, arrives at the house where she is staying. Addressing Foe, purportedly the author of her story, she is also, implicitly, addressing her omniscient narrator.'

'Book reviews can have a variety of functions: they might summarise part (but usually not all) of a book’s content, analyse this same content through political or ideological lenses, perform close textual readings, highlight recurrent themes and symbolism, situate a work within an author’s oeuvre, or provide essential historical, cultural, or social contexts. These, of course, are all important tasks that can enrich and broaden the reader’s understanding of a book; in this sense, book reviewing and academic literary criticism share many goals, even if their audiences and methods frequently differ.' (Introduction)