Cirrus@Austlit

'Nam Le is one of the strangest writers in the history of Australian literature and is also one of the most incandescently brilliant — which is very weird if you bear in mind that his primary claim to legendary status is a book of short fiction published in 2008. With 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Le returns with a new work that encapsulates the brilliance and complexity that fans and critics have come to expect.' (Introduction)

'In Killing for Country, David Marr confronts Australia's dark colonial past, revealing unsettling truths about the Australian Native Police's brutal acts. Published during the Voice referendum, Marr intertwines personal ancestry with national guilt, urging Australians towards truth-telling and reconciliation. This isn't just history; it's a call for atonement.' 

'Biographer Nicholas Shakespeare tells Peter Craven how he made sense of British author Ian Fleming – a man almost as enigmatic as his singular creation: James Bond' 

'It might come as news to the deity that the poor are a forgotten item. Yet Peter Polites, in a rather dumbfoundingly awkward book, is keen to press the case for poor suffering Greeks, both at home and in their diaspora, and for the poverties of spirit and material circumstance they have, God knows, endured.' (Introduction)

'Captain Robert Scott’s second doomed expedition to the South Pole is the stuff of legend. He and his comrades were beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen and then died in extraordinary blizzard conditions. The saga is the subject of what’s generally reckoned to be a literary masterpiece – The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard – and its enactment of pain and heroism is central to Patricia Cornelius’s play Do Not Go Gentle, in which the struggle becomes a metaphor for the emotional life of a group of people in an aged-care home.' (Introduction)

'In 1869, just after the American Civil War and just before Anna Karenina appeared, Henry James O’Farrell, Irish by birth and affiliation but long domiciled in Australia, took a shot at Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, one of the younger sons of Queen Victoria, who was visiting Sydney at the time.' 

'It's 45 years since Helen Garner published Monkey Grip and perhaps a while later that people realised how fine a writer she was. In 1997 there was that shock of recognition that someone had succeeded in re-creating inner-urban Melbourne, the 'aqua profunda' part of the Fitzroy pool, the tumult and tumbling from bed to bed of shared housing, the heartache of loving a junkie. The initial response to Monkey Grip was a response to a literary brave new world that was also the translation of something real. Indeed, there were critics such as the late Peter Pierce who said that Helen Garner had just talked dirty and called it realism. Yes, and along with this, there was the persistent accusation that she had simply published her diaries and served them up as fiction. This last point had come to seem like the most vulgar misprision by the time I wrote a full-dress defence of Garner in Judith Brett's Meanjin in the mid 1980s.' (Publication abstract)

'Horse? Could that title sound familiar because it was a Richard Harris movie of the 1960s? Well, Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for March (2005) and author of novels about everything from the characters in Little Women to the life of King David, is not one to be deterred by daunting precedents. She is a senior journalist who has gone on to use her capacity to master information and then spin it to spectacular effect in order to tell a story in which historical data and its artful arrangement yield an effect that is epical because of the way a many-voiced choir animates the chorales that underline the Passion that is dramatised.'(Introduction)   

'Les Murray was a mesmerising poet because he had a technique that could encompass the world. He had a magical sense of music and of rhythm as a driving force.'

'No contemporary Australian writer has higher claims to immortality than Gerald Murnane and none exhibits narrower tonal range. It’s a long time since we encountered the boy with his marbles and his liturgical colours in some Bendigo of the mind’s dreaming in Tamarisk Row (1974). There was the girl who was the embodiment of dreaming in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976). After The Plains (1982) came the high, classic Murnane with his endless talk of landscapes and women and grasslands, like a private language of longing and sorrow and contemplation.' (Introduction)