Cirrus@Austlit

'Writing in 1934, George Davis lovingly described Mae West as “the greatest female impersonator of all time”. The following year, the daughter of a corset model and a two-bit boxer was the highest-paid woman in the US, having transitioned from burlesque hoofer to actor-playwright to screen star — where she still wrote her own lines.' (Introduction)

'Juniper May’s world is rocked when she receives a letter from her classmates in Grade 6C telling her she’s a freak and that they wish she’d never been born. The robot-obsessed loner stops going to school and asks Google how to write a hit musical. Robot Song — performed by Juniper (Ashlea Pyke) and her arty but impractical parents — is the result.' (Introduction) 

'Cosi is the second in Louis Nowra’s trilogy of fictionalised stage memoirs: “part memory, part imagination — but mostly downright lies”. Nowra appears in all three as his alter ego, Lewis.' (Introduction)

'Storm Boy is a slight story, not quite 9000 words, but author Colin Thiele has a rare capacity to conjure up the raucousness and profusion of nature, and to capture a child’s excitement and wonder. It’s a story you hear and see — and feel — while reading.'(Introduction)

'If you know Wake in Fright only from its screen adaptations, Kenneth Cook’s original novel is a shockingly modern thing. It has none of the malevolence that defines the 1971 movie and 2017 miniseries remake. Instead, there is a pervasive sense of moral anxiety.'(Introduction)

'In the early 1410s, after 20 years of marriage, 14 children and countless post-natal visitations from Christ, Margery Kempe persuaded her husband to take a vow of chastity with her. An illiterate middle-class woman, Kempe generally is regarded as having written the first autobiography in English. She dictated it in the third person. And, by god, she writes like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.'(Introduction)

'There’s a lot going on under the crass sitcom surface of Zoey Dawson’s new play, Australian Realness, but not a great deal of incentive to go fossicking for the fool’s gold beneath.' (Introduction)