'More than two decades ago, Christos Tsiolkas’s his first novel Loaded was published and he had achieved a cult following in the short-lived grunge fiction scene of Australian writing. The novel was quickly adapted as the film Head On (1998), directed by Ana Kokkinos, and starring popular young Greek actor, Alex Dimitriades; like the novel, it was well-received by critics, if not by mainstream literary and cinematic culture. For the next few years, Tsiolkas worked on Jump Cuts, an experimental collaborative autobiography, with Sasha Soldatow (1996), as well as a number of theatre productions – Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (1999, co-written with Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves and Patricia Cornelius, and adapted to film as Blessed, also directed by Kokkinos [2009]), Thug (1998, written with Spiro Economopolous), and Elektra AD (1999) – but when The Jesus Man (1999) was published, its violent depiction of depression and suicide received critical attention as offensive and unnecessary. Partly because of the reception of The Jesus Man, and partly because of the density of its subject matter, his next novel, Dead Europe (2005) took six years to write. In the interim, he published a critical study of the film The Devil’s Playground (2002), and several more plays and screenplays: Viewing Blue Poles (2000), Saturn’s Return (2000), Fever (2002, co-written with Bovell, Reeves and Cornelius), Dead Caucasians (2002), Non Parlo di Salo (2005, written with Economopoulous), and The Hit (2006, written with Netta Yashin). Dead Europe was a triumphant return: it won the Age Book of the Year and the Melbourne Best Writing Award in 2006.' (Publication summary)
'I still come across people who find Christos Tsiolkas’s work creepy or off-putting. Usually these people have had a brush with Dead Europe and decided that it is too bleak, too violent, too sexually explicit, or perhaps too explicitly political. They haven’t read on. It strikes me as an odd reaction, or at least one that is trapped in a particular moment, and hence overlooks the trajectory Tsiolkas’s career has taken since the publication of The Slap in 2008. As Jessica Gildersleeve tells us in the acknowledgements to Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision, she in fact first read The Slap with her mother’s book club. I’m sure the experience isn’t unusual. I’m sometimes in a similar situation: my parents and their reading group friends are very eager to talk to me about Tsiolkas, the television adaptations of his work and the sense of controversy that lingers over him. They might find aspects of the writing creepy or off-putting as well, but they’ve embraced these responses and are eager to understand them. These contexts – domestic, familial, intergenerational – tell us a great deal about the sort of writer Tsiolkas has become, and about his centrality to public discussion. And yet there is still the shadow of the other Tsiolkas: the Tsiolkas whose work haunts and unsettles in ways that don’t quite lend themselves to the reading group format, the family dinner table or chats with Mum.' (Introduction)
'I still come across people who find Christos Tsiolkas’s work creepy or off-putting. Usually these people have had a brush with Dead Europe and decided that it is too bleak, too violent, too sexually explicit, or perhaps too explicitly political. They haven’t read on. It strikes me as an odd reaction, or at least one that is trapped in a particular moment, and hence overlooks the trajectory Tsiolkas’s career has taken since the publication of The Slap in 2008. As Jessica Gildersleeve tells us in the acknowledgements to Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision, she in fact first read The Slap with her mother’s book club. I’m sure the experience isn’t unusual. I’m sometimes in a similar situation: my parents and their reading group friends are very eager to talk to me about Tsiolkas, the television adaptations of his work and the sense of controversy that lingers over him. They might find aspects of the writing creepy or off-putting as well, but they’ve embraced these responses and are eager to understand them. These contexts – domestic, familial, intergenerational – tell us a great deal about the sort of writer Tsiolkas has become, and about his centrality to public discussion. And yet there is still the shadow of the other Tsiolkas: the Tsiolkas whose work haunts and unsettles in ways that don’t quite lend themselves to the reading group format, the family dinner table or chats with Mum.' (Introduction)
