Cirrus@Austlit

'“When I began to write seriously, I chose biography as the form that interested me most,” writes Brenda Niall in her introduction to her 2015 biography Mannix. Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman Who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock is the latest in her many distinguished examples of the form, and it is enthralling. Lindsay is a beguiling, almost inscrutable, subject. Niall delves forensically into her fabric, body and soul.' (Introduction)

'What kind of novel is most suited to these times of political and ecological instability, resurgent authoritarianism, misogyny and surveillance, an era where human complexity is reduced to simplistic identity categories and binary issues? Yumna Kassab’s The Theory of Everything is an ambitious answer. Both one book and five short books – or perhaps five short stories and five experimental texts – its fractal structure is intriguing and elusive.' (Introduction)

'It’s not quite right to call Eileen Chong’s sixth book of poetry, We Speak of Flowers, a collection. As Chong explains in her author’s note, this is a single, book-length poem, whose 101 discrete fragments “can be read in any order”. One might pick their way through the poem at random or read slowly forward while circling continuously back. Either way, “the shifting juxtapositions will give rise to innumerable permutations,” Chong tells us. “Each reading will construct the poem anew.”' (Introduction)