Cirrus@Austlit

'Selected by one of Australia's most acclaimed poets, this inspired collection captures the richness and scope of present-day Australian verse. It features innovative and exciting poems - many published here for the first time - from our best-known poets as well as daring and insightful works from rising stars.

Together they create a lively sense of conversation, of voices criss-crossing the continent, exploring the many themes that animated and inspired the nation's poets in 2010.' (From the Publisher's website)

'In this collection, acclaimed writer Mandy Sayer brings together nine of the best Australian examples of the long story - tales that combine the intensity of the short story with the complexity of a novel.

In these stories, characters grow up, hook up and break up, endure calamitous loss and discover delectable love, travel to faraway places and fifi nd themselves right back where they started. From the exotic to the familiar, the sensuous to the dangerous, these soaring flights of the imagination boldly traverse the vast terrain of human experience.

Showcasing the talents of some of our most loved and awarded authors, this invigorating collection is an excellent introduction to an often overlooked art form, promising to enchant all lovers of Australian fiction.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Alex Leefson is astronomy's glamour girl, in love with the satellite Europa and the equally unreachable Phoebe. Meanwhile, her husband Daniel mourns the demise of his marriage and his life. Full of Dorothy Porter's customary bite and sensuality, Wild Surmise is an engrossing duet between two passionately estranged voices. An intensely moving verse novel of passions and vulnerabilities, love and death.' (Publication summary)

'Fast, Loose Beginnings is a racy anecdotal memoir of John Kinsella's meetings with the great and colourful men and women of poetry. Since his late teens, Kinsella has been rubbing shoulders and working with a host of acclaimed poets. The book opens with Kinsella on a bender in search of Dorothy Hewett, and goes on to tell the story of his friendships and massive fallings-out through the highs and lows of addiction.

'In this contentious account, Kinsella weaves his impressions of these figures personally, with a lively and incisive commentary on their place within the broader literary culture. Here, in good company, are intimate portraits of Dorothy Hewett, Les Murray, American literary critic Harold Bloom and French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as they have never been seen before. As a highly respected poet and critic, Kinsella brings clarity and biting irreverence to the writer's life, making this encounter with literature vividly alive.' (Publisher's blurb)

'This ... collection of stories features a foreword by Dr Pam Johnston that places Ruby’s anecdotes in the context of a country which seems incapable of healing its past or of creating a better future for Indigenous people. Featuring the best stories from Ruby’s Real Deadly, plus many unpublished gems dating as far back as 1992, All My Mob’s portrayal of family life, ‘home’, and life as an Aborigine in today’s Australia is fascinating, often confronting and unforgettable.' (Source: UQP website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)

'The Best Australian Poetry 2009 celebrates the originality and verve of Australian poetry at this moment. In this collection of 40 poems Alan Wearne brings long experience as a poet and teacher of poetry, and a sharp eye for the surprising. Bookended with an introduction by Wearne and the poets' commentary on their work, this year's collection is a sophisticated and accessible sampling of recent achievements in Australian poetry.' (From the publisher's website.)

Biographical notes on the contributing poets are included, together with a substantial comment by each poet their selected poem.

'This year's Best Australian Essays offers riveting snapshots of the nation's "current loves and angers, its art and myths and amusements and gender concerns - and its propensity for bushfires."

'From Alex Miller on the creative imagination to Mark Dapin on crime myths, from Amanda Hooton on Miss Universe to Tim Flannery on the inner lives of animals, this is a collection that takes the pulse of the nation's writers and thinkers and finds them in rude health.' (From the publisher's website.)

'In The Best Australian Stories 2010, Cate Kennedy presents a seductive line-up of the year's most exciting short fiction, featuring the best work from publications around the country alongside pieces published here for the first time. ...

By turns playful, heart-wrenching, intimate and exuberant, these twenty-nine stories reveal the strength and variety of Australian fiction today. The authors include first-timers as well as established masters, and the result is a stimulatingly diverse collection. ' (From the Publisher's website)

'In 1970 Kate Jennings, twenty-one, stunned a Sydney anti-war rally with a pull-no-punches speech that put "women's lib" on the map. Brave, impassioned and searing, the speech set the tone for the idiosyncratic career that was to follow. A few years later, she was on her way to New York, where she would make her name as a writer and enjoy a ringside seat at some of the most confronting events of our time.

'Trouble collects Jennings's best work from the last four decades. With a polemical anger tempered by a keen sense of the absurd and a fiercely independent streak, she writes incisively about politics, morality, finance, feminism and the writing life. She describes America with the keen eye of an outsider and looks back at Australia with an expatriate's frankness.

'Trouble is both an unconventional autobiography and a record of remarkable times. From the protest movements of the 1970s, via Wall Street's heyday and dramatic collapse, to the historic election of Barack Obama, Jennings captures the shifts - seismic and subtle, personal and political - that brought us to where we are now. After four decades, Kate Jennings' work is as exhilarating and impossible to categorise - shocking with the shock of recognition - as the day it was written.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Five plays from around the country which illustrate that the rich tradition of indigenous storytelling is flourishing in contemporary Australian theatre.' (Source: Australianplays.org)

'Oscar Hopkins is an Oxford seminarian with a passion for gambling. Lucinda Leplastrier is a Sydney heiress with a fascination for glass. The year is 1864. When they meet on the boat to Australia their lives will be forever changed ...'

(Source: Publisher's website)