'I am looking for something to say about the short story as a category, something to distinguish it, and my mind alights on the word ‘fun’. Is it possible, I wonder, that the short story permits the author to play, to have fun, in a way that other forms do not? Do we tend to ignore this because the word ‘fun’ is difficult to fit into an aesthetic claim, because the concept itself seems to resist being aestheticised, its monosyllabic punchiness evoking childish play or adult condescension that dodges the analytical eye? It was just a bit of fun. Don’t you know how to have fun? This isn’t fun.' (Introduction)
'In Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever, tiny comets blaze across the pages. Connecting disparate histories, their orbits disrupt the order of time, a function of the novel’s non-linear form.'
'There’s this thing you hear in music – or, if I’m trying for precision, in the silences in music. It’s a reaching, a stretching. There’s a suspended wonder to it; a lazy sensuality, sometimes. It’s probably in lots of places if you know what to listen for, but I hear it most in classical music, since that is where I learned to listen, to count, and to keep time. And I hear it in Simon Tedeschi’s intimate book of fragments, Fugitive.' (Introduction)
'Early in Grace Chan’s novel Every Version of You, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin pass a monument erected at Melbourne’s Federation Square that commemorates the deaths caused by a US airstrike in 2041 – the attack, by now, a distant memory. At one point in Joan Fleming’s verse novel Song of Less, a character called Cousin Groundpigeon says ‘Remember countries?’ ' (Introduction)
