Cirrus@Austlit

'The Benson the Boxer storybook provides non-threatening opportunities for children to understand and process grief and loss and move forward with their lives. Whether read on its own or used in conjunction with the Benson the Boxer Program for Grief and Loss, children who have suffered the pain of losing a relationship will find something here that speaks to them.' (Publication summary)

'A follow-up to the critically acclaimed Jam Tree Gully, Firebreaks records life and ecology in Western Australia.

'Known for a poetry both experimental, “activist,” and lyrical that reinvents the pastoral, John Kinsella considers his and his family’s life at Jam Tree Gully, in the Western Australian wheatbelt, and his deeply felt ecological concerns in this new cycle of poems about place, landscape, home, and absence. Part One, “Internal Exile,” explores issues of departure and return as well as alienation in Jam Tree Gully. Part Two, “Inside Out,” reevaluates how Kinsella and his family deal with ideas of “space” and proximity while also looking out into the wider world. How do we read an ecology as refuge? What lines of communication with the outside world need to be kept open? As Paul Kane observed in World Literature Today, “In Kinsella’s poetry . . . are lands marked by isolation and mundane violence and by a terrible transcendent beauty.”' (Publication summary)

'In this brave and lucid account, Julia Leigh broaches a challenging life event often left undiscussed: how the struggle to have a child can take an agonizing toll. Leigh’s experience at the vanguard of medical science is acutely rendered, physically and emotionally, transmitting what it feels like to so desperately wish for a child while knowing that the odds are stacked against you. From the daily shots she puts herself through at home, to hopes raised and dashed, and finally to the decision to stop treatment, Avalanche bears witness to Leigh’s raw desire, suffering, strength, and, in the end, transformation―a shift to a different kind of love. The reader looks behind the scenes of a clinic and discovers how things really work: reality is a far cry from the slick marketing of the billion-dollar infertility industry. As for so many women, Leigh’s treatment failed, but her ghost child lingers in memory.' (Publication summary)

'After the Fall introduces us to a brilliantly eccentric family from New York’s Upper East Side. Pops, a self-made millionaire, is a mad inventor who gleans his inspiration from popovers and Raquel Welsh. Mother is a fabulously dressed but mercurial socialite from Buenos Aires whose weapon of choice is a croquet mallet. Young Alan, our earnest and studious narrator, and his drama-queen little sister, Alex, love their parents but must turn to their good-natured housekeeper and cook for a better sense of reality.

'One fateful day, Alan returns home to find that the family has gone bust, not even a penny to be found. The next morning, to the children’s surprise, the family wakes up in Central Park along with the entire contents of their penthouse arranged just as before—art, furniture, pugs, and all. Aided by their two loyal housekeepers and fed by the maitre d’ from their favorite restaurant, the family makes Central Park into a comfortable and creative home.

'But soon the strains of life—and the weather, which is getting chilly—threaten to tear apart the parents’ marriage. As the holiday season approaches, the children rise to the challenge of bringing their family back together.

'With more than two hundred drawings and featuring kimono-clad squirrels and a visit by a Yeti, this delicious tale is a love letter to family, creativity, and New York.'

Source : publication summary

'Gabriel Brockwell, aesthete, poet, philosopher, disaffected twenty-something decadent, is thinking terminal. His philosophical enquiries, the abstractions he indulges, and how these relate to a life lived, all point in the same direction. His destination is Wonderland. The nature and style of the journey is all that's to be decided.

Taking in London, Tokyo, Berlin and the Galapagos Islands, Lights Out In Wonderland documents Gabriel Brockwell's remarkable global odyssey. Committed to the pursuit of pleasure and in search of the Bacchanal to obliterate all previous parties, Gabriel's adventure takes in a spell in rehab, a near-death experience with fugu ovaries, a sexual encounter with an octopus, and finally an orgiastic feast in the bowels of Berlin's majestic Tempelhof Airport.

Along the way we see a character disintegrate and re-shape before our eyes. Lights Out In Wonderland carries you through its many corridors of delight and horror on the back of Gabriel's voice, which is at once skeptical, idealistic, broken and optimistic. An allegorical banquet and a sly commentary on these End Times and the march towards insensate banality, DBC Pierre's third novel completes a loose trilogy of fictions, each of which stands alone as a joyful expression of the human spirit.(Publisher website)

'Some of the best, most significant writing produced in Australia over more than two centuries is gathered in this landmark anthology. Covering all genres - from fiction, poetry and drama to diaries, letters, essays and speeches - the anthology maps the development of one of the great literatures in English in all its energy and variety.

'The writing reflects the diverse experiences of Australians in their encounter with their extraordinary environment and with themselves. This is literature of struggle, conflict and creative survival. It is literature of lives lived at the extremes, of frontiers between cultures, of new dimensions of experience, where imagination expands.

'This rich, informative and entertaining collection charts the formation of an Australian voice that draws inventively on Indigenous words, migrant speech and slang, with a cheeky, subversive humour always to the fore. For the first time, Aboriginal writings are interleaved with other English-language writings throughout - from Bennelong's 1796 letter to the contemporary flowering of Indigenous fiction and poetry - setting up an exchange that reveals Australian history in stark new ways.

'From vivid settler accounts to haunting gothic tales, from raw protest to feisty urban satire and playful literary experiment, from passionate love poetry to moving memoir, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature reflects the creative eloquence of a society.

'Chosen by a team of expert editors, who have provided illuminating essays about their selections, and with more than 500 works from over 300 authors, it is an authoritative survey and a rich world of reading to be enjoyed.' (Publisher's blurb)

Allen and Unwin have a YouTube channel with a number of useful videos on the Anthology.

'The first volume of Clive James's autobiography.

''I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.'

'In the first instalment of Clive James's memoirs, we meet the young Clive, dressed in short trousers, and wrestling with the demands of school, various relatives and the occasional snake, in the suburbs of post-war Sydney. His adventures are hilarious, his recounting of them even more so, in this - the book that started it all...

''You can't put it down once started. Its addictive powers stun all normal, decent resistance within seconds. Not to be missed' Sunday Times

'"All that really needs to be said to recommend Unreliable Memoirs is that James writes exactly as he talks, which is all his millions of fans could wish" Evening Standard' (Publication summary)
 

'An almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what, Cultural Amnesia is Clive's unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the 20th-century. From Charles de Gaulle to Thomas Mann, from Hitler to Wittgenstein, from Argentina to Australia, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record – and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.' (Publication summary) 

'In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus story, Leela May travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of her lover, Mishka.

'Leela is a mathematical genius who escaped her hardscrabble Southern home town to study in Boston. It's there that she meets a young Australian musician, Mishka. From the moment she first hears him play, busking in a subway, his music grips her, and they quickly become lovers.

'Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation centre somewhere outside the city. There has been an 'incident', an explosion on the underground; terrorists are suspected, security is high. And her old childhood friend Cobb is conducting a very questionable interrogation. Over the years Cobb has never forgotten Leela and the secrets she knows.

'Now he reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. That there may be more to him than growing up in the Daintree rainforest in northern Queensland in an eccentric musical family. Leela has already discovered on her own account that some nights when Mishka claims to be at the music lab are actually spent at a cafe. A cafe, Cobb tells her, known to be a terrorist contact point.

'Who can she believe?

'And then Mishka disappears.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Nineteenth-century Irish actress Harriet Smithson, the woman who brought Shakespeare to Paris and made the role of Ophelia her own, is the muse for this stunning novel.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.