Cirrus@Austlit

'‘I have worked at Dusty’s since I was fifteen,’ says Kathy, the pally narrator of Katharine Pollock’s novel Her Fidelity. She’s 29 now, going nowhere slowly. Kathy’s workplace is a down-at-heel Brisbane record store and her workmates are dissatisfied, heavy-drinking men: frowning Jason, pretty Ian, pervy Warren, Silent Andy, and the store’s jaded owner and namesake, Dusty. Then there’s Mel, the other woman on staff, who commands the store’s office, sorting rosters and dispensing wisdom and snacks. Seventeen years older than Kathy, Mel is gay and unfazed by her male colleagues: the implication of her sexuality within the novel is that, among men, she has nothing to prove. Kathy, by contrast, is two parts exasperation to one part propitiation in the face of her male frenemies, as she calls them. Mel is cool. Kathy is uncool and she knows it.' (Introduction) 

'An advance from a publisher can sound like a windfall, but the reality is closer to a bet made on an artist’s commercial success—and for most authors, an unstable and unliveable form of income.' (Introduction)

'In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of cycling groups in Europe were founded on socialist principles. I had some notion, before reading Jeff Sparrow’s Provocations, of the link between cycling and that era’s feminist politics – the independent, bloomer-clad woman on her bicycle, which Sparrow also sketches – but not of Italy’s Ciclisti Rossi (Red Cyclists) or England’s Clarion Cycling Club.'  (Introduction)

'A groundbreaking new work of non-fiction by one of Australia’s most respected essay writers.

'No Document is an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and expansive, Anwen Crawford’s book-length essay explores loss in many forms: disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. From the turmoil of grief and the solace of memory, her perspective embraces histories of protest and revolution, art-making and cinema, border policing, and especially our relationships with animals. No Document shows how love and resistance echo through time.

'Anwen Crawford is best known for her writing as a critic, but here she draws on her background as a zine-maker and visual artist, and her training in poetry, to develop a new way of writing about the past, using a symphonic method of composition and collage. No Document is an urgent, groundbreaking work of non-fiction that reimagines the boundaries that divide us – as people, nations and species – and asks how we can create forms of solidarity that endure.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'The article reports that filmmaker Richard Lowenstein states that musician Bono's confession got Lowenstein thinking about the "dilemma" of fame, and particularly about how it might have affected the two men's late singer Michael Hutchence. It cites a report that concluded that Hutchence had committed suicide, but a persistent rumour took hold that he had died as the result of a sex game gone wrong.' (Publication abstract) 

'Australian director Cate Shortland has made three feature films about young women who find themselves out of their depths. Her first, Somersault (2004), set in wintry Jindabyne, featured Abbie Cornish in an early and memorable role as a troubled teenage runaway. Lore (2012) was adapted from Rachel Seiffert’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Dark Room; its titular character, the daughter of Nazis, must lead her younger siblings on a difficult journey across Germany during the last days of World War II. Shortland’s new film, Berlin Syndrome, also takes places in Germany, as the title suggests, and is also adapted from a novel. But the setting is contemporary, and the plot concerns Clare (Teresa Palmer), an Australian tourist and photographer, whose chance meeting with a local man has awful consequences.'  (Introduction)