Cirrus@Austlit

'The most charismatic of the many monsters in Elizabeth Bryer’s début novel is the conceptual artist Maddison Worthington, who commands attention with her lipstick of ‘Mephistophelian red’ and her perfume of ‘white woods, musk and heliotrope’. From the solitude of a labyrinthine mansion, Worthington devises headline-grabbing installations, and performances that often incorporate hidden-camera footage of her audiences. Her ideas, though provocative, are largely stolen from her assistants or from little-known artists in developing countries. Worst of all, Worthington has accepted a lucrative – some would say Faustian – commission from the Department of Immigration for a project called ‘Excise Our Hearts’.'  (Introduction)

'Chris Andrews’ latest translation, Melodrome (2018), published here in Australia as part of Giramondo’s Southern Latitudes Series, is a novella by the Argentine science fiction writer, Marcelo Cohen (1951-). The author of 14 novels, 5 story collections, many essays and countless translations, Cohen is already well-known in the Spanish-speaking world. He lived in Spain from 1975 to 1996, during the dictatorship in Argentina, and has been publishing fiction since the early 1980s.'  (Interview summary)

'An Australian writer and a Mexican scientist fall in love reading great Latin American books aloud. But it takes a decade of journeys across the region, together and apart, for them to learn to read each other.

Requiem with Yellow Butterflies is a love story and travel memoir that unfolds against the turbulent backdrop of Latin America in the 2000s. It takes us on a 1200-kilometre question-mark shaped loop through the newly socialist republics of the “pink tide,” to a requiem mass for Mexico’s disappeared and eventually back to Australia.

Through evocative, unexpected pairings of southern hemisphere places and authors – Jose María Arguedas’s Andes and Judith Wright’s Cooloola coast, the Argentine pampa and the central Queensland brigalow country – the book explores distinct but parallel postcolonial literary traditions, the disordering state of love and the strangeness of coming home.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

' Three decades on from his death, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) remains arguably Latin America’s most widely-translated and influential twentieth-century writer at a world-scale (Sánchez-Prado 33). This study provides the first detailed account of Borges’s Australian reception, covering the period from the publication of the first two English anthologies of his work until the thirtieth anniversary of his death. Borges raises some interesting methodological questions for Australianists. What happened when this great Latin American modernist, having been translated and canonised by the northern metropole, suddenly became widely read and highly influential in another space at the southern periphery of the world republic of letters? What are the implications of the way Borges’s work has been read in Australia for recent transnational critical methodologies that tend to view world literature as a series of interactions between a Northern centre and Southern periphery? To what extent can world literature, as it has been formulated in Europe and the United States, account for the flow of texts, literary forms, and influence between Latin America and Australia? A diachronic survey of Australian responses to Borges’s writing – including texts by Martin Johnston, Helen Daniel and Michelle Cahill – allows the essay to track Australian literary culture's deepening engagement with Latin American writing across the Cold War period and beyond.'

Source: Abstract.