Cirrus@Austlit

'Virtuosic performance text, palimpsest of a nineteenth-century Russian folktale, and a merciless and often very funny sectioning of the self, Ania Walwicz’s horse enacts what it names: ‘Polyphony as identity’. The narrative more or less follows the story of The Little Humpbacked Horse by Piotr Jerszow, in which a magical horse repeatedly helps Ivan, a foolish young farm boy, towards his fairy-tale ending. In Walwicz’s wilder and more fragmentary retelling, the protagonist’s identity comprises both horse and rider, tsar and groom, tyrant and the tyrannised, abused child and academic, the self of fiction and the ‘autobiographical’. The effect is almost Cubist, in that all of these facets are visible without becoming a settled, realist literary image.'  (Introduction)

"Parked in by furious rich people, mid-divorce, a man misses his lunchtime gambling session. All the girls named Ella form a diagonal across the teacher’s new classroom. Diseased cattle burn in fields around the country – it is a cameraman’s role to frame the images for TV. A swagman jumps into a billabong, or was he pushed?

"Bernard Cohen’s stories are filled with incisive perspectives, captivating wit and dark, sharp humour."

'A witty, irreverent and intelligent satire of Australian politics.

'A soon-to-be-elected Australian prime minister invokes the spirit of Sir Robert Menzies and astonishingly, the Great Man rises from the grave. But in Canberra, amongst the nation′s leaders, the revived Menzies is rarely listened to and hardly visible. Increasingly discontented with his role as mere nostalgic symbol, Menzies escapes from Canberra. He runs westward, becoming larger and more powerful as he runs.

'This, perhaps the most significant untold story in Australian political history, lands in the lap of the Antibiographer, whose contracted book on Menzies is years behind schedule. Could this be the break the Antibiographer needs to redeem his career? Will he be able to track down the Menziean colossus and save his book and reputation? And can the out-of-control Menzies ever be contained?

'The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies is playful, lyrical, surprisingly poignant and very funny.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Speed Factory is experimental writing at its most inventive - a game of words played with a partner and a set of rules, each player developing a thread, or two, of another's ideas. The result is an exhilarating, playful, and sometimes contradictory reflection on the speed of contemporary life.'(Publication summary)