'Summer is the time for good stories. This lively new collection from Black Inc. draws together new and published short fiction from some of our country’s most talented storytellers, showcasing the vibrancy and diversity of Australian short fiction. Each of these memorable tales will stay with you long after reading – and the collection as a whole makes the perfect holiday gift. Whether you’re by the pool, on the beach or lazing in the park, spend your summer with Australia’s best writers. Featuring new stories from Tony Birch, Stephanie Bishop, Elliot Perlman, Aoife Clifford, Michael Mohammed Ahmad and many others, this brilliant collection continues Black Inc.’s long tradition of discovering and celebrating the country’s finest writers.' (Publication summary)
'We need to have a talk with the girls in the office about the uncomfortable liminality of the tops they wear over their leggings. It is becoming extremely distracting, the ontological indeterminacy of their fashion. Is it a blouse? Is it a tunic? Is it a dress? These troubling questions are not conducive to productivity in the workplace.' (Introduction)
'Whenever I am up high, looking out over the city, I feel like a character in a movie. Not that I feel myself to be glamorous or interesting the way characters in movies generally are, but rather, when I look down at the lines of traffic and the neon lights flashing in shop windows, and the tiny people hurrying here and there, this experience seems to come to me secondhand. I have had this experience many times before, but at some remove, when watching a film in which a sad female protagonist looks down from a window in a high-rise apartment and observes the lines of traffic and the neon lights flashing in shop windows, and the tiny people hurrying here and there, noting the miniature bustling of the city with great interest because her own life seems to have paused and she doesn't know, for the moment, how to make it travel forwards again...' (Publication abstract)
'Seventeen weeks after they moved to the city, Sofia stole her boyfriend’s mouth. She’d been toying with the idea, on and off, for months. She knew it was the lazy way out. She didn’t want things to just be handed to her – she wanted to work, to grow. She had been to the Volkshochschule and sat on a hard chair for three hours waiting to be given a number to be given a lesson. Around her the glow of green walls with no windows and a queue that made no sense, peeling posters that she deciphered, word by word, guess by guess. The classes were booked for the next three months: that was fine. She waited patiently, downloaded apps on her phone and practiced phrases with waiters and supermarket employees. Ich hatte gerne, she said. Tut mir leid, she said. Einmal Glas Rotwein, she said, and gracefully accepted the correction and the drink. She started her classes and tried to take joy in the swift rush of nouns, of simple constructions. Floundered out on the street again. Turned her failures into funny stories, good jokes. She tried her best. She really thought she was doing her best. But in the end it was so much easier to just take what she wanted.' (Introduction)
'Many readers – though apparently not enough to have saved them – will mourn the recent demise of Black Inc.’s annual Best Australian anthologies of essays, stories, and poems (which first appeared in 1998, 1999, and 2003, respectively). The last of these, however, has won something of a reprieve in Best Summer Stories, edited by Aviva Tuffield. A publisher at Black Inc. when this new project began, Tuffield has since moved to UQP. It seems a good decision to have retained her as editor.' (Introduction)
'Many readers – though apparently not enough to have saved them – will mourn the recent demise of Black Inc.’s annual Best Australian anthologies of essays, stories, and poems (which first appeared in 1998, 1999, and 2003, respectively). The last of these, however, has won something of a reprieve in Best Summer Stories, edited by Aviva Tuffield. A publisher at Black Inc. when this new project began, Tuffield has since moved to UQP. It seems a good decision to have retained her as editor.' (Introduction)
