Cirrus@Austlit

'One way the history of a publishing house can be told is through the readers of the books that a publisher produces. Not a generic general reader, but individual readers and their personal histories that entwine with the publisher’s history, through books, over the years. As readers reflect on and are changed by particular books, a larger cultural and social history is made. That, at least, is my case in relation to UQP, and I’d like to share some of that history with you.' (Introduction)

'In one sense, Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and Selected Poemscan be seen as a replacement for Hook and Eye: A Selection of Poemspublished in 2014 in the Braziller series. That wasn’t, I suppose, a true Selected, more a brief introduction (it runs to just under a hundred pages) for those unacquainted with Beveridge’s work. Sun Music has a slightly exiguous feeling as well: one hundred and seventy pages chosen from her earlier books and a nearly book-length collection of new poems which provides the book’s title.'  (Introduction)

'Something about Australia’s settler-colonial foundations is getting in the way of its future somehow. I write this, watching humpback whales jump and twist off the New South Wales south coast, swimming somewhere this side of the line where the continental shelf drops away to deep ocean. It is a 15-minute walk through the spotted gum forest to shell middens that date back to the last great rise in water levels, flanking a lagoon that carries its Djirringan name but whose surrounding lands were expropriated before 1900.' (Introduction)

'In Otherland (2010), Maria Tumarkin writes: ‘Humility is a big deal to me…’, and her first three nonfiction books – all of which delve deeply, unapologetically and revealingly into ‘serious’ territories – carry the imprint of that Big Deal, in their conception and tone. Tumarkin has previously approached trauma, genocide, war, loss, guilt, systematic oppression, and survival with exploratory urgency. Her newest book, Axiomatic, is written in the same spirit. Here, Tumarkin has taken Australian society and culture as her chief subject for the first time, attending to very real but not obviously historical crises, while expanding on thematic concerns that run through her body of work. It is her most vital, compressed and compelling book to date.'  (Introduction)

'Melissa Lucashenko’s new novel Too Much Lip is a dark comedy about ordinary people. Set in the fictional Australian town of Durrongo, stories of generations of an Aboriginal family living on Country are shared through a fast-paced plot. Secrets are unravelled, character flaws are revealed. Traces of settler-colonial violence and intergenerational trauma weave through their lives. What Lucashenko leaves readers with is a sense that the family members will heal themselves by protecting Country and supporting each other.' (Introduction)

'In December 2017, the artist and radio producer Jesse Cox died from a rare soft tissue cancer, Alveolar Soft Part Sarcoma. He was terribly young, only 31.' (Introduction)

'Time is fluid in Stephanie Bishop’s new novel Man Out of Time, an intimate portrait of a family breaking down. The narration is split between the points of view of Stella, her mother Frances, and her father Leon. Bishop captures the fluctuations of her characters’ consciousnesses so closely that the reader experiences narrative time in loops and layers as memories are uncovered and reintegrated into her characters’ thoughts. Leon is the man ‘out of time’ as he tries to salvage the family unit; his own perception of time is distorted by mental illness; and he ultimately runs out of time to save his own life.'  (Introduction)

'On 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires ravaged Victoria and ended the lives of 173 people. At the site of the fire that started in Churchill, a town in the Latrobe Valley, detectives found evidence suggesting it was intentionally ignited. Not far from the site, they discovered ‘a sky-blue sedan parked at an odd angle by the grass verge of Glendowald Road. The car looked to have stopped suddenly’. As the detectives gathered witness reports, they heard that during the bushfire, an unusual man was spotted wandering through the blaze, carrying in his arms a tiny dog. The results from the sedan’s plates return, and they discover it is owned by Brendan Sokaluk, a LaTrobe Valley local. From there, The Arsonist, by Chloe Hooper, proceeds in three parts—The Detectives, The Lawyers, and The Courtroom—and ends with the conviction of Brendan Sokaluk.'  (Introduction)

'Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, which I co-authored with Dr Roger Osborne, is in many ways the first in its field, the first comprehensive history of American editions of Australian works or, as it became, the first study of the careers of books and authors in the American marketplace. Evidence had been emerging in new editions of colonial texts, in occasional biographies and scattered articles, but when we began the research there was no ready answer to the most basic question — which Australian books had been published in the USA? — let alone when and how and with what effect.'   (Publication summary)