Cirrus@Austlit

'Picture Trent Dalton sitting on a Brisbane street corner. A typewriter on a folding table in front of him, a hand-made sign stuck to it, upon which is written the words, ‘sentimental writer seeks stories’. Here he is, the most bankable Australian writer of the decade: a storyteller on the street, a man on the tools, a displaced sentimental bloke trying to make sense of twenty-first century life. And this is how he wrote his latest book, a work of non-fiction called Love Stories, the title of which is self-explanatory. Dalton has kept the ecstasy and epiphany dials turned to eleven since the release of Boy Swallows Universe in 2018 – and Australian readers love him.' (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)

'Discussing the challenges of setting fiction in his adopted America, expatriate Peter Carey recalled a comment by one of his students: ‘when you change countries you lose your peripheral vision.’ Working up the nerve to take stock of the ‘democratic experiment’ in Parrott and Olivier in America (2009), Carey sensibly muffled any missteps in the picaresque blunderings of two fish-out-of-water nineteenth-century Europeans, a myopic nobleman and his roguish footman. Though it’s 2011 when 22-year old Melburnian Will lugs his backpack from the airport carousel, Emily Bitto’s second novel Wild Abandon adopts a similar strategy: figuring its millennial hipster as a quixotic adventurer, charting the (Introduction)distance between his American dream and obstinate reality for comic juxtaposition.' (Introduction)

'History happens to us in dreams: it is experienced and understood there as much as in our waking lives. Neuroscientists have known this for some time, but these pandemic years have provided a sudden abundance of data, intensive and immediate, and global in scale, for those who work with dreams. Their reports are of dreams about swarming insects, billowing gas, and other transferred contaminations; about shadowed monsters and snipers lurking on the other side of a window or wall. There are more literal dreams about funerals and hospitals, accidental handshakes or hugs; about forgotten face masks, a new variant of that archetypal dream of public nakedness realised suddenly and far too late. In pandemic dreams, the dead speak. The dreamer cannot find their way home, is pursued. All of these are dreams that grapple with upheaval and threat, with fear, with the difficult adjustments to a world unsteadied suddenly, transformed.'(Introduction)

'It begins with a woman barely able to speak. The woman is me, and I am choking in my sleep. My partner mentioned it to me last spring – you know you stop breathing during the night, right? – and I shrugged, feigning disinterest in my body and its nocturnal patterns while thinking about a strange sensation that started a few years ago: visceral, physical dreams where my mouth would fill with peanut butter, the concrete-like spread sticking my molars and vocal cords together. More recently these dreams of choking have been tinged with COVID anxiety – I am sick, my dream self thinks, so I must stay away from others. I looked up the interpretation of these dreams and learnt that they signalled swallowing an unpleasant part of your life until it can no longer be seen, spoken of, or heard.' (Introduction)

'As the title of Gerald Murnane’s final work makes clear, this book is not one that should be opened by a reader new to his work, one who might be looking for an introduction. Such a reader would be better served by going to any of the earlier works. The reader addressed instead seems to be one who has read Murnane before, as he says, with ‘good will’. To put this more clearly: this is a work that involves Murnane looking back, as a reader, and with his various conceptions of readers who have already engaged with or informed his work, on what has been written, rather than a book that introduces his works to a new reader.'(Introduction)

'Browsing the shelves of fiction at the renovated Marrickville library, a reader’s attention is drawn to the icon taped onto the spine. A heart for romance, a dragon for fantasy, a ringed planet for science fiction, a detective for noir, a kangaroo for Australian fiction, an Aboriginal flag for Indigenous fiction, and on, and on. It is necessarily reductive; how can you distil a whole field to a single symbol? Classification systems like these cannot account for boundary-crossing fiction, nor for subgenre, nor for texts that subvert genre expectations. And if a novel is both Australian and science fiction, which category is considered the most appropriate, the more important, to be put on the spine, and who is it that makes these decisions? What does it mean for a novel to be marked and marketed in this way, and how is it effected in so-called Australia? And when a novel is designated a genre, how does this affect a reader’s encounter with it?'  (Publication summary)