Cirrus@Austlit

'Unusual narrators in fiction demonstrate how a willing suspension of disbelief touches every aspect of the reading experience. After a few pages of Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, we are reconciled to the fact that the narrator is a foetus. In Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector, we grow comfortable under the guidance of a narrator that is a 6000-year-old Mesopotamian bowl. Likewise, in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, we accept a narrator who is dead. Fiction is replete with narrators that are atoms, horses, bees and death itself. Colin Varney’s Earworm adds a song to this list of unusual narrators.'  (Introduction)

'When in 2017 Nordstrom began selling US$425 jeans (A$620) covered in fake mud, it seemed the long prophesied “late stage capitalism” had finally arrived. Suddenly the phrase itself was everywhere from Reddit to Twitter and applied to every freakish story about excessive consumption or corporate perfidy.' (Introduction)

'For the last 30 years, we have been warned that there is a crisis with boys' reading skills. This is usually located within a larger panic about the perceived decline in general academic skills amongst boys. This again often mutates into conservative jeremiads against the “war on boys”, where natural masculinity is being drained away by an ill-defined but nevertheless pervasive conspiracy against clear gender roles. The way to get boys reading again, so these observers argue, is to reintroduce them to “manly” tomes such as Kipling's Captains Courageous, Twain's Huck Finn and Hinton's The Outsiders. As Troy Potter's Books for Boys notes, even governmental agencies are forced into proposing reading matter which it is presumed will interest typical boys—action, mystery, fantasy and detective fiction are mentioned (3). Dealing with the perceived crisis inevitably becomes a policing of gender roles and these genres develop a reciprocal relationship with the reader, both responding to and producing masculinity norms. Problems emerge, however, when these books promote masculine ideals that are white, able-bodied, heterosexual and working class.' (Introduction)