Cirrus@Austlit

'I do not long for a dick. This comes easily to me, I don’t say it defensively. I am lucky to not long for a dick because I was assigned male at birth. As the story goes, when the doctor spilled my freshly birthed body into my mother’s arms, she held me and looked up, dopy, exhausted, into my father’s eyes and said ‘Robbie, what’s wrong with his penis?’ He replied ‘Kim, it’s a girl.’ This was obviously a lie. The correct answer was there is so much wrong with my penis. I was assigned fucked up dicked at birth. My mother says she was so used to birthing boys at this point that she assumed my vulva, swollen and red from the constriction of birth, was a penis. But that version of a dick – the engorged vagina – is exactly the type of dick, one of them, I have now and is, in fact, everything I want in a dick.'  (Introduction)

'Have you ever been really stoned with a complete stranger and even though, even in your heightened state, you know that everything that’s happening is just a bit of fun, there’s something so deeply off-putting about watching this stranger become unmoored from themself in front of you that you begin to panic? Consider the following passage from Hydra, Adrianne Howell’s debut novel, in which the protagonist, Anja, alone and unravelling in her secluded beachside property, prepares to take herself out on the town:...' (Introduction)   

'Men I Trust is the sophomore graphic novel from Australian (now Montreal-based) Tommi Parrish. Like fellow artists Simon Hanselmann, Lee Lai and Adrian Tomine, Parrish’s work summons a mumblecore – the indie film genre that quietly flourished in the early 2000s – sensibility. But while mumblecore on film – with its dialogue-heavy, action-light plots and inwardly obsessed protagonists – arguably registered as somewhat twee and myopic, in graphic novel form this approach to storytelling is much more nuanced and affecting. Men I Trust sees Parrish perfectly capture the vulnerability, tension and flux of navigating relationships – romantic, familial, self-fulfilment – under the pressures of capitalism.' (Introduction)   

'I saw this TikTok last year. It starts with someone, white, wearing a short-sleeved button-up shirt, leather-strapped watch, asymmetrical haircut, lip-syncing to recorded dialogue.'  (Introduction)

'Last year, Craig Silvey’s third novel was published, his first since the hugely popular Jasper Jones in 2009. Honeybee, a story about a troubled trans teenager, Sam, and their unlikely friendship with the older widower Vic was considered, on publication, to be fairly offensive by many trans readers, myself included. Offensive because it is a cis man writing a trans teenager with all the predictable tropes: a troubled home life, suicide attempts, ambiguous language that evades gender until a big ‘reveal’. I watched the book come out, I watched it sell well, and I watched as not one reviewer engaged with it as a literary critic. No one considered it worthy of literary criticism, seemingly on the basis of its relationship to transness. I hate being a trans person when a book like this comes out, not because I feel unsettled in my identity, but because I hate being treated like I’m too fragile to understand the stakes of fiction by critics who aren’t assessing it as such.' (Introduction)

'Almost a Mirror, the second novel from Kirsten Krauth, is a dark and sticky trip to the post-punk music scene of Melbourne in the 1980s. Mona, Jimmy, Beñat, Kaz and Dodge – along with some Nick Cave cameos – orbit St Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom as the text spins and staggers between eras, moments and memories.' (Introduction)