Cirrus@Austlit

'This essay examines Christos Tsiolkas’s short stories. Tsiolkas’s stories are less widely known compared to his novels and often unsettle the view of his writing popularised by his best-selling fourth novel, The Slap (2008). The stories collected in Merciless Gods (2014) suggest new ways of thinking about Tsiolkas’s often criticised writing style and his reliance on first-person male narrators. The stories in Merciless Gods also tend to have a more varied and interesting provenance than the single author collection of the successful novelist. This essay therefore considers the original publication contexts of Tsiolkas’s stories and their post-publication editing history. Finally, this essay contextualises Tsiolkas’s stories in relation to some of the structural dynamics of Australian short story publishing over the past three decades, including authorial publishing subsidies, multi-author theme anthologies, and the expansion of university creative writing programs. This suggests that Tsiolkas’s path to Merciless Gods is not unusual for a writer who came of age in the 1990s and achieved success as a novelist in the following decade, even though these dynamics are not necessarily the same for Australian short story writers today.' (Publication abstract)