Cirrus@Austlit

'Introducing the McDonagh sisters … a trio of extraordinary and ground-breaking filmmakers. Between 1926 and 1933, the mostly self-taught McDonagh sisters made four trail-blazing independent feature films in Sydney and Melbourne. Paulette, one of only five women film directors in the world, was behind the lens, writing and directing. Phyllis produced, art directed and conducted publicity. And Isabel, under her stage name Marie Lorraine, was in front of the camera, acting in main roles. Together, they transformed Australian cinema’s preoccupations with the outback and the bush – and what the sisters mocked as ‘haystack movies’ – into a thrilling, urban modernity.

'In Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters, Mandy Sayer tracks the sisters’ remarkable story, from their childhood as daughters of a respected Sydney surgeon, learning the art of filmmaking and their first feature film, Those Who Love (1926), an instant hit, to their controversial final film, Two Minutes Silence (1933).

'Although the trio didn’t set out deliberately to blaze a trail of feminism, their collective confidence and independence was striking at a time when there were few career options available to women.' (Publication summary)

'After the corpse of a newborn baby is discovered in a nearby laneway, an adopted girl being raised in a funeral home finally appreciates the sanctity of her own life. A drug dealer goes missing and his many clients plot an outrageous plan to ensure his safe return, with comically fatal results. A middle-aged playwright conspires with a young university student to commit a scandalous act of literary fraud. A man takes a live-in job at the local funeral home so he can eventually transport kilos of marijuana inside funeral home’s coffins. A co-dependent mother suspects her beloved and mentally-ill son of murder, triggering a moral dilemma. A successful gynaecologist develops a severe cocaine addiction. A young boy about to testify in court about his mother’s innocence in a murder trial decides to lie under oath. An elderly drug runner for strippers and prostitutes plans to pass on the business to his only son. In the final, novella-length story, a young couple decides to escape the grime and noise of the city and camp on the property of an uncle’s farm, to help the uncle search for his teenage niece, who has mysteriously vanished without a trace.' (Publication summary)

'When American writer Flannery O’Connor had difficulty writing her debut novel, she pretended to herself that every chapter was in fact a self-contained short story, the form with which she was most comfortable. This trick she played on herself allowed her to complete her first full-length work of fiction, Wise Blood.

'The nine individual chapters of Anna Krien’s first novel, Act of Grace, contains many of the features of the modern short story (starting, as Chekhov advised, in the “middle of things” and ending with narrative resonance, rather than resolution).'  (Introduction)

'Bad parents often make good literature: the egotistical and controlling Sam Pollit in Christina Stead’s tour-de-force The Man Who Loved Children; the abusive father and alcoholic mother in Edward St Aubyn’s masterful trilogy Some Hope; and, in William Faulkner’s gothic novel, As I Lay Dying, the cowardly and manipulative Anse Bundren who, among his many misdeeds, forces his pregnant teenage daughter to forgo her savings for an abortion so he can buy a set of new false teeth and attract a second wife.' (Introduction) 

'The purity of mathematics has inspired a number of significant writers. Lewis Carroll, for example, incorporated mathematical concepts with hilarious absurdist themes in the narratives of all Alice books.' (Introduction)

'In the past month or so, the Australian feminist movement has suffered multiple setbacks.

'The proposed federal budget would leave single mothers, women over 50 and women already financially marginalised living with even fewer resources. In Geoffrey Rush’s successful defamation case against The Daily Telegraph, the judge concluded the main defence witness, actress Eryn Jean Norvill, was at times “prone to exaggeration and embellishment”.'(Introduction)

'How does a researcher write a biography when the subject doesn’t want to participate in the process, let alone see the book published? Margaret Simons is an award-winning journalist of 13 books, including an acclaimed biography of Malcolm Fraser, but even she had to exercise extreme diplomacy and patience when negotiating with the intensely private and guarded Penny Wong.'  (Introduction)

'Misfits & Me represents a selection of Mandy Sayer’s non-fiction writing from the past twenty years. Each essay has been chosen to reflect a different aspect of Mandy’s attraction to Australia’s misfits and outsiders, from child gangs and hoarders to pensioner drug dealers. Sayer also writes with her inimitable frankness about her unconventional family, her unusual marriage to playwright and author Louis Nowra, and her writing process. ' (Publication summary)

'Shaun Prescott worries he will wake up and discover the success of his debut novel, The Town , is just an existential dream, he tells Mandy Sayer

'When I finished reading Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town I was naturally curious about the author, whose book jacket biography is unusually brief: he lives in the Blue Mountains and has had a few short pieces previously published in literary magazines.' (Introduction)

'Take 24 single people from diverse backgrounds. Add poverty, disabilities and old age, then house them among drug dealers and creeping mould. A recipe for chaos? Not at all. Here's proof that life, in any circumstances, is what you make it.' (Source : SBS online)

'Today, roughly 100,000 Gypsies call Australia home, yet until now their experiences have been hidden from our history, and from our present. 

'Here, award-winning memoirist and novelist Mandy Sayer weaves together a wide-ranging and exuberant history of Gypsies in Australia. She begins with the roots of Romani culture, and traces the first Gypsy people to arrive in Australia, including James Squire, the colony's first brewer. She meets Gypsy families who live all over Australia, who share the stories of their ancestors and their own lives. 

'With her own nomadic early life and experiences as a street performer, Sayer brings unique insight into the lives of the people she meets, and a strong sense of their extraordinary history. She also demolishes some longstanding but baseless myths along the way. Her original and compelling book reveals a rich part of our history that few of us even know is there. ' (Introduction)

'The list of literary couples is a distinguished one: Percy and Mary Shelley, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, to name a few. Curiously, none of the just-mentioned duos ever wrote and published a book together. Whether due to differing prose styles or competing egos — or both — cohabiting and co-writing is highly uncommon.' (Introduction)