'Nakkiah Lui is one of the country’s funniest, smartest and most deliciously outrageous playwrights. To call her a force of nature is less accurate than saying she is a one-woman cyclone. Her work – including her scripts for TV and her podcast Pretty for an Aboriginal – rips through this country’s cultural landscape, tearing down deadwood structures, pitching sacred cows into the air and laying bare a landscape that is scarred by its colonial history and strewn with the bones of massacre. And still, she makes you laugh. Even her 2018 play Blackie Blackie Brown, whose Aboriginal anthropologist protagonist literally digs up some of those bones, is as hilarious as it is provocative.' (Introduction)
'Conjoined twins have long been a source of fascination, if not the subjects of disturbing scrutiny. Perhaps the most famous were Chang and Eng Bunker, who were brought from Thailand – hence “Siamese twins” – to America to be exhibited and, despite their experience of racism, later became wealthy slave owners in the antebellum south. More recently, Abby and Brittany Hensel, American sisters conjoined at the torso, have been the subject of extensive media coverage, including a reality TV show.' (Introduction)
'Gerald Murnane’s insular, self-reflexive and obsessive style of essayistic fiction has attracted special praise of late. However, while The New York Times may have described him as “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of”, Murnane’s first poetry collection, Green Shadows and Other Poems, is not exactly a heavyweight affair.' (Introduction)
'Into the Fire may sound like a thriller or a lurid true-crime story. But while Sonia Orchard’s novel features a death and a mystery, it is, at heart, more of a tale of the ups and downs of female friendship than a whodunit.' (Introduction)
