Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1910 the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil--yet while Houdini is remembered today for his failure, the true record-holder has been forgotten. This quirk of history becomes the focus for the obsessions of Bernard Cripp, world-weary scion of an ailing family circus, who tries to unearth every detail of Houdini's flight in order to re-enact it. But why is Bernard so single-minded? As his manic testimony unspools, his story takes on a darker tone: he is, in fact, in mourning for a wife and child he has lost to the skies, and paralysed by the uncertainty surrounding their deaths. If his efforts to re-create history cannot bring back his loved ones, can they at least bring him peace as he struggles to live with his loss?

'In Waypoints, his outlandish début novel, Adam Ouston embarks on a journey to reclaim a lost sense of awe and wonder from subjects as diverse as Victorian vaudeville and cutting-edge data storage, from the early history of Alzheimer's disease to the immortality of human consciousness. Blending the solemnity of Sebald with the breathlessness of Bernhard, the result is equal parts rambunctious and ruminative, poignant and hilarious -- a wild ride through a storm of grief, ambition, integrity, remembrance, and love.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'It is the morning of the Sculptor’s execution. The unnamed narrator has come for her heart, which she’s hidden in a glass jar beneath a loose floorboard in the local chapel. It still beats and seems to be growing. As the funeral procession winds through the city, the narrator recounts the story of her work at the city’s bathhouse, and the different kinds of love she holds for the Sculptor and the Gravedigger. All the while she asks: What is love? Against a backdrop of civil revolt against the city’s duplicitous mayor, The Fetish tells a story of love, ambition, art, loneliness and the eternal struggle between security and desire.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In conversation with Adam Ouston on 1 and 12 January 2015, novelist, broadcaster, critic, traveller, and one of Australia's most prominent and respected writers, Robert Dessaix, discusses his motivations for both travelling and writing. Addressing topics from domestic life to vulnerability, friendship to eros, art to illness, Dessaix talks about the ways travel contributes to his senses of self and home, how travelling to visit shrines, or embarking on pilgrimages, is both meaningless and essential, and the importance of the traveller's imagination. Revisiting major themes from most of his works, Dessaix acknowledges a continuing desire to encounter absolute otherness, and traces many of its (often threatening) manifestations throughout his writing.'  (Introduction)

'This paper examines Robert Dessaix's tourist experiences in his fifth book-length publication Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004). Drawing on tourism theorists John Urry and John Frow, I suggest that Dessaix's travel experience shifts between the self-conscious coolness of the post-tourist and an unselfconscious, humanist quest for authenticity. I analyse these shifts in terms of Ning Wang's concept of “existential authenticity” which he differentiates from objectivist, constructivist and post-modernist approaches to authenticity. Dessaix essentially engages with, or moves playfully between, each of these modes. Ultimately, though, they dovetail at Courtavenel, France, when he visits one of Turgenev's former dwellings, revealing an essential sense of absence at the centre of Dessaix's identity, one that speaks to his absent biological parents, his lack of a concrete genealogy, the silence that surrounded his homosexuality in the first part of his life, and the threat of mortality that permeates Dessaix's work and his efforts to engage with his “true self”. In this way, Dessaix's travel experience not only characterises his journey as a quest for existential authenticity, but it also confirms Judith Adler's notion of travel as an artform that is capable of articulating subjectivity.'(Publication abstract)