Cirrus@Austlit

'Thirty years ago, my folks migrated to a city half-dipped in ocean. To this day, they are sepia-faced and prayer-shaped, coal soot and cedar hills still rolling underneath their fingernails.' (Publication abstract)

'A vision of the future drawing on the terrors of our present: pandemics, food shortages, climate change and cyber war — is the only solution to retreat into hibernation? But what will be waiting for you to wake up?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'On 9 May 1933, the day before the Nazis burned her book as part of their action against books of ‘un-German spirit’, Helen Keller wrote an open letter to them, which was published on the front page of the New York Times. ’You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe,’ she said, ‘but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.’ Today, if Helen Keller is thought of at all, it’s as the blind and deaf girl who, through the efforts of her teacher, learned to communicate. There’s scant acknowledgement that she was even capable of having ideas, and she’s often reduced to nothing more than testament to the ideas of others. However, Keller not only spoke, but read and wrote four languages, and was a prolific poet and essayist. The ideas that led to the Nazis burning her book Out of the Dark were contained in the essay ‘Why I Became a Socialist’.' (Introduction)