Cirrus@Austlit

'This week on The ABR Podcast Geordie Williamson reviews Highway 13, a collection of short stories by Fiona McFarlane. Each story is concerned with murder, that ‘ultimate de-creative act’, and might be thought of as true crime, given the real-world familiarity of characters, places, plots. Geordie Williamson is a literary critic, editor and the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found. ' (Introduction)

'Jorge Luis Borges thought the appearance of a major new author or creative work should prompt a realignment of literature’s family tree. Fresh genealogies of influence suddenly manifested, while old antecedents could find themselves pruned to a nub. Borges knew that actions in the present can remake our sense of past and future both.' (Introduction) 

' The man who wants to pay Aaron, an 18-year-old heroin addict, for sex, is known simply as “The Man”. He is closer to 70 than 60, has black hair, tailored suits and an expensive car. “Everything about him says money, real money and opportunity” – or so thinks the teen who accepts the deal, against the grain of every hope and want aside from his need for drugs and the glorious, temporary extinction they provide. ' (Introduction)   

'God Forgets About the Poor opens with a chapter-length monologue: a brilliantly fierce, haunted and hilarious tumble of recollection and editorial harangue, directed by a 70-something Greek–Australian woman to her adult son, an author, insistent that he write a book about her: “Start when I was born. Describe the village and how beautiful it was. On the side of a mountain but in the middle of a forest.”' (Introduction)

'This week, on the ABR podcast, literary critic and editor Geordie Williamson reviews J.M. Coetzee’s new short story collection The Pole and Other Stories. At the age of eighty-three Coetzee has again proved himself a ‘true and loving creator’, argues Williamson, by denying his characters endings or wholeness – ‘the great lie of art’. Listen to Geordie Williamson with ‘Last things: J.M. Coetzee’s antipodal forces’, published in the July issue of ABR.' (Introduction)

'George Orwell’s first wife emerges vividly from Anna Funder’s new book, writes Geordie Williamson There have been seven biographies to date of George Orwell. All are solid, extensive, thoughtfully-researched works, writes Anna Funder, who has read them carefully. But there is a problem: all of them are written by men.' (Introduction)   

'First came global heating, when people suffered in a world consumed by fire. Then, in a dramatic climatic reversal, rain began to fall from a saturated atmosphere: downpours that ceased for just long enough each day to reveal a pale disc of sun. Animals drowned and streams became rivers that ran in endless spate. In a matter of years, modern civilisation was inundated, reduced to a scattered, shantytown version of itself.' (Introduction)   

'W. G. Sebald was justly celebrated for the melancholy antiquarianism of his prose. The Anglo-German writer placed his narrators – solitary eccentrics or survivors of some traumatic past – amid historic spaces in England or Europe. There they moved through decayed mansions or unvisited museums, places emptied of life yet replete with stuff. Uncanny access to the past was granted by virtue of old postcards or Edwardian bric-a-brac.' (Introduction)