Cirrus@Austlit

'OK, I’m just going to say this right at the start: Dance Academy, a feature film sequel to the successful Australian television series, is better than La La Land. Now that may seem like an extravagant plie (I looked up the words for ballet movements after seeing this movie) and people will disagree with me. Even Faye Dunaway thought La La Land should have won a best picture Oscar.' (Introduction)

'Jane Rawson is an explorer of the odd. Her 2013 debut novel A Wrong Turn in the Office of Unmade Lists was a dystopian voyage into narrative implausibility, featuring a ruined Melbourne and California’s Bay Area. More recently her novella Formaldehyde (2015) featured a dead protagonist in a love triangle. Both were works of eccentric originality.' (Introduction)

'Every so often a popular book comes along that’s so compelling in its storyline, so vivid in its execution, so skilful at bringing to life its characters, that it makes you want to cheer. So it is with Vivienne Kelly’s The Starlings, a racketing novel set in Melbourne in 1985.' (Introduction)

'In this era of soaring house prices and desperate first-home buyers, it’s very brave or very silly to centre a contemporary Australian novel on the concept of property ownership. Puzzlingly, the newly married couple of Ashley Hay’s A Hundred Small Lessons purchase a large piece of riverside real estate without so much as mentioning the huge mortgage they have presumably signed up for. The sense of wonder increases when you learn that one of them does not work, and the other — scarcely less precariously — is a newspaper journalist.' (Introduction)