Cirrus@Austlit

'From the first page, Ghost Cities is a novel built on shifting ground. The portentous introduction of Imperial heir Lu Huang Du as a youth who knows himself to be ‘Exceptional’ is immediately undercut by the decidedly unexceptional image of him ‘gawping’ as his ‘purple-faced’ father chokes to death on a chicken bone. Five pages later, in the next chapter, we find ourselves riding the bus with luckless anti-hero Xiang Lu, who has just lost his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate because it’s been discovered that he doesn’t actually speak Mandarin.' (Introduction)   

'A woman ‘comes to’ in darkness, eyelids and mouth taped shut, thoughts leaden and lagging. A second woman tends to the first, rubbing life back into her cold limbs in a grotesque pantomime of birth. Even as Esther’s awareness of the world around her grows, her thoughts compulsively circle back to her children, Wolfie and Clare. ‘Where am I?’ she asks Grace after her breathing tube has been removed. Then: ‘Where are my kids?’'(Introduction)   

'If pressed, I would describe Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower as a collection of stories about bodies. Divided into three sections—‘birth’, ‘life’ and ‘death’—the stories explore the way bodies, with all their needs and desires, are controlled, exploited and disregarded. Yet I like that this doesn’t quite get to the heart of them, that these stories don’t fit together as neatly as that.' (Introduction)

'Climate anxiety is understood by psychologists to be a form of ‘practical’ anxiety as it is considered a rational response to the threat of climate change and can lead to constructive behaviours. At a Melbourne Writers Festival panel in 2022, Else Fitzgerald described her debut short story collection, Everything Feels Like the End of the World, as an attempt to work through her own climate grief, a sorrow that has its roots in the successive periods of drought and flooding she experienced growing up in East Gippsland. This, surely – writing a book – is the kind of ‘constructive behaviour’ the psychologists have in mind. But what of climate anxiety that clamps down, that debilitates and immobilises? The anxiety I feel in relation to the climate crisis leaves me swinging wildly between maniacal bouts of information gathering and long periods of psychic paralysis, during which I work equally hard to avoid any mention of climate change and its attendant calamities.' (Introduction)

'When reading books on motherhood, it’s difficult not to connect them to your own experiences. Laura McPhee-Browne’s Little Plum demonstrates the power of fiction to slice open the quotidian to reveal the viscera of what it means to bear children.' (Introduction)

'Am I a good mother or a bad mother? This question inflects my perception of each day, of my every action and every word as they steadily accumulate into the imago I hold of myself as a mother. Healthy snacks: good. Screen time: bad. Embraces: good. Snapping, shouting, screaming: bad bad bad.' (Introduction)

'After the deliquescent dream of Pink Mountain on Locust Island, Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby is a wake-up call from a silent number in the small hours of the morning. Leen lives in the fictional outer suburb of Par Mars, a typical sprawl of shopping centres, housing estates, and units fronted by flat open lawns. Yet just beneath all the grass and concrete runs an undertow of surveillance and violence that feels both strange and strangely familiar.' (Introduction)

'When I open a book by a white writer and am confronted by the point of view of a person of colour, my body tenses as if in anticipation of a blow. Rather than reading, I pick nervously at the writing in search of cliché and oversimplification. Because the source of the tension I feel in relation to point of view is less a question of who has a right to whose story than it is one of craft. As Rankine and Loffreda point out in their introduction to The Racial Imaginary, “our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are” and therefore susceptible to the same preconceptions under which we labour as the products of an entire history of racist culture, politics and violence. The first-principle question is not therefore: “can I write from another’s point of view?”, but instead: “why and what for?”' (Introduction)