Cirrus@Austlit

'STEVE TOLTZ IS AN ISOLATE of Australian literature. He has no readily traceable ancestors locally, and admirers but no imitators, perhaps because his style is too distinctive to borrow. The international inspirations he has name-checked – Jane Bowles, Clarice Lispector, Roberto Bolaño – are detectable in his work only in trace quantities, and his sensibility comes with a distinctly northern hemisphere pedigree: European modernist pessimism, as told through American comedy. Only his settings remain antipodean. He has lived overseas for many years (various European capitals, the French countryside, Park Slope and then Los Angeles), yet his novels are all set in Australian suburbia, the jurisdiction of his memory.' (Introduction)

'IN HIS NEW BOOK, Fugitive, the Australian pianist Simon Tedeschi describes the many faces of the child prodigy:

To his public, the child prodigy is a robot or a God.

To his rivals, he is a false prophet.

To his rivals’ teachers and parents, he is a demon.

To his society, he is a symbol.

But to himself, he is simply a ghost.

(Introduction)

'A BRISBANE WOMAN, May, inherits from her grandmother 24 acres and a lakeside house in Nebraska. Her name is the only pretty thing about May’s life. She is nearly 40 and working as a nanny to a child whose parents treat and pay her as a person from an underclass. She has been married since late teenage years to a controlling, nasty man, and her son, the one person she hoped would make her life redeemable, is becoming a copy of his father. But inheritance equals agency and the words “new start” flood her mind. She could leave her husband. May quits her job and books a flight to Nebraska, to the place called “Loveland”. The name is unintentionally sardonic.' 

(Introduction)