Cirrus@Austlit

'Ben Mendelsohn, currently seen in the harrowing drama Una, has adapted to life in the US, where he has become an in-demand film actor. But his teen years spent living there were more tumultuous. “The cultural shift was profound and deeply weird to me. I couldn’t make any sense of who those strange beings were.” By Steve Dow.'

'Although this novel opens with the disappearance of Harold Holt and ends with the collapse of the Twin Towers, most of it is focused on a brief, important moment that feels both distant from the present day and uncomfortably close. No More Boats tells the story of how Antonio Martone, the patriarch of a Parramatta family in late 2001, reaches an “existential crisis” that coincides with our own when we can’t decide what to do about the Tampa and its 438 human passengers. ' (Introduction)

'Melanie Cheng won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for this collection as an unpublished manuscript – more evidence perhaps of the renaissance of the short story in contemporary publishing. It begins with a distinctly non-literary epigraph: Malcolm Turnbull declaring that “There has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian”. This claim is deconstructed in a series of social portraits that exposes the blindness of Turnbull’s patriotism.' (Introduction)