Cirrus@Austlit

'In both contemporary Perth and nineteenth-century England, a woman is suddenly struck by a mystifying and very private pain. Alice, a writer, and her older husband Duncan, an academic, find their marriage threatened as Alice investigates the history of hysteria, female sexuality and the treatment of the female body, while in 1860s London, Arthur sees his wife suddenly struck by a pain for which she can find no words, forced to endure harmful treatments and reliant on him for guidance.' (Publication summary)

'Writing has long been recognised as a way of locating the self. As a concept, this functions in multifaceted ways, from the importance of cultural expression and representation, to philosophical and linguistic conceptualisations of subjectivity in language. Emile Benveniste wrote of the fall into language : 

'it is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of 'ego' in reality, it its reality which is that of the being. '

(From the Editors 8)

'In 1969, in a quintessentially Australian town on the remote north-west coast, the locals prepare to celebrate their role in the moon landing. In 2000, as the townsfolk brace themselves for a cyclone, Lucky, this novel’s pink and grey narrator, uses transmissions from a satellite dish tuned to galah frequency to make sense of what she saw and heard from her cage in the 1960s. Quirky? Unbelievable? Tracy Sorensen’s The Lucky Galah upsets preconceptions in a smart and charming account of a human population on the cusp of radical social transformation. (Introduction)

'Disability may be thought of as comprising layers of disadvantage and marginalisation, with each specific form of disability expressing and responding to its own particular combination of layers - its own unique cross-sectional profile. Layers may include the site where disability is experienced and the form disability takes, among other possibilities. In vulvodynia, the site of disability is the female genitals, and the form of disability is chronic pain, with the cause of pain being unknown and generally invisible [...]' (Introduction)

'Shortly after her son, Luke, was murdered by his father, Rosie Batty spoke of the non-discriminatory nature of family violence: ‘No matter how nice your house is, how intelligent you are. It can happen to anyone, and everyone.’ If Batty’s is an example of the less easily imagined site of domestic violence, Anna Spargo-Ryan’s second novel, The Gulf, presents us with a more conventional alternative: a disadvantaged environment, a mother (Linda) who loses herself in each man she encounters, and her children, Skye and Ben, who pick up the slack. But when Linda meets Jason, a shady bloke in ‘import–export’, and the three move from Adelaide to his home in ‘shithole’ Port Flinders, incipient violence turns overt, erratic mothering becomes neglect, and Skye is forced to protect herself and Ben, and to make decisions that will affect them all.' (Introduction)

'In the midst of preparing for an important London exhibition, photographer Andrew is drawn back to Australia by the sudden disappearance of his former girlfriend, Kirsten. His compulsion to resolve this troubled relationship evolves into a desire to account for an earlier loss. As Andrew grapples with his ambivalence about a new photographic subject, and his ability to sustain the ‘small, bright miracle’ of his present-day relationship with Dominique in Berlin, the complex role of photography in his life is redefined.'

(Introduction)