Cirrus@Austlit

'Readers familiar with Robbie Arnott’s fiction will have some expectations about the kind of book the author is likely to conjure. Dusk sits comfortably inside the thematic and narrative territories he has previously explored, particularly in The Rain Heron (2020) and the wonderful Limberlost (2022). Dusk features Arnott’s typically vivid descriptive prose and his concern with the natural world and our place within it. Dusk generates pathos with delicate expertise and mixes genres while retaining a strong semblance of realism.'  (Introduction)

'Kári Gíslason’s memoir of escape and adventure during his early adulthood begins in transit: he is freshly eighteen, ‘sleeping on the floor next to hot air vents at the back of a grand old ferry that connected Brindisi in the heel of Italy with Athens’. Kári is travelling with an ‘often-jolly, sometimes sarcastic’ Scotsman named Paul, and their relationship has begun to fray. Worse, they are low on money, which means their travels and ‘freedom’ may soon be over. Gíslason notes: ‘We were unemployable. I was sickly thin, and my hair past my shoulders and knotted. Paul always looked like he’d just woken up.’ Both are searching for ways to forget their troubles and orient themselves as they take the first steps into manhood, but the pressures that come with such a task have left them feeling oppressed and alienated.' (Introduction) 

'When the London theatres closed due to plague in the late 1590s, a still-young William Shakespeare composed and published ‘Venus and Adonis’, a poem about unrequited love, lust, and devotion to beauty. Shakespeare evokes a desire to touch, to kiss, to smell, to taste, to share breath. Christos Tsiolkas’s book 7½ (2021), written and published under similar circumstances, embodies some of this Shakespearean spirit, but his conception of beauty extends to a fuller range of sensual experience, accommodating everything that is human and alive – the stench as well as the perfume – while rejecting whatever seeks to diminish beauty and liveliness. It is the work of a writer who is in love with this world, despite its cruelties. The In-Between mirrors and extends that sensibility.' (Introduction)          

'Emmett Stinson’s brief critical survey centres on Gerald Murnane’s four major ‘late fictions’, beginning with Barley Patch (Giramondo, 2009) and ending with Border Districts (Giramondo, 2017). It is a timely and illuminating companion to Murnane’s recent fiction and works well as an extension of the first monograph on his work, Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (Oxford University Press, 1993). Although the two books have different points of focus, they are slim yet substantial studies, each dealing with a distinct period of Murnane’s literary career, and both are eminently readable.' (Introduction)

'Brian Castro dramatises and even valorises forms of literary and artistic failure throughout his fiction, but his body of work is a raging success by mortal standards. None of his novels disappoint on close inspection. Double-Wolf and Shanghai Dancing are endlessly rewarding; The Swan Book is gorgeously written and deeply moving; After China is conceptually neat, seductive and stylish. Others, such as Drift and The Bath Fugues, appeal to select readers but are dazzlingly rich and structurally brilliant. Even Stepper—which Castro sees as a relatively conventional spy novel—is a satisfying and affecting Nabokovian game. Every novel is stamped by a talent that induces envy as much as gratitude. You want to know what it feels like to write that way.' (Publication abstract)

'A breathtaking, confronting memoir that examines class, poverty, neglect, masculinity, and the transformative power of books

'Things may have been good for a while, but it didn't last- they argued fiercely and he left. Weeks later, she tracked him down and said she was pregnant. So he moved back in with her and they prepared themselves for parenthood.

'Eleven months later I was born. By the time my father discovered the deception, it was too late.

'There is something chastening about this mode of conception, about knowing that, by most standards, your beginning was aberrant.

'In this arresting memoir, Shannon Burns recalls a childhood spent bouncing between dysfunctional homes in impoverished suburbs, between families unwilling or unable to care for him. Aged nine, he beats his head against the pillow to get himself to sleep. Aged ten, he knows his mother will never be able to look after him- he is alone, and can trust no-one.

'Five years later, he is working in a recycling centre-hard labour, poorly paid-yet reading offers hope. He begins reciting lines from Dante, Keats, Whitman, speeches by Martin Luther King, while sifting through the filthy cans and bottles. An affair with the mother of a schoolfriend eventually offers a way out, a path to a life utterly unlike the one he was born into.

'With its clarity of purpose and vividness of expression, Childhood is a powerful act of remembering that is destined to be a classic.' (Publication summary)


 

'Bani Adam returns as the narrator–protagonist of Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You, a sequel to his two previous books. The most recent one, The Lebs (2018), gave us the story of Bani’s teenage years at Punchbowl Boys’ High School: the trials of a Lebanese Muslim boy in a majority Lebanese Muslim community nestled inside the larger, diverse territories of Western Sydney, in post-‘War on Terror’ Australia. The Other Half of You is an account of Bani’s late teens and early twenties, and of an inner conflict between religious, cultural, and romantic pieties.' (Introduction)

'On the back cover of O, we learn that the protagonist of the novel, Dominique, lived through the German occupation of France, participated in the Resistance, relished its ‘clandestine life’, and later wrote an ‘erotic novel about surrender, submission and shame’, which became the real-life international bestseller and French national scandal, Histoire d’O (1954). ‘But what is the story really about,’ the blurb asks, ‘Dominique, her lover, or the country and the wartime past it would rather forget?’' (Introduction)

'In the very early hours of an otherwise unmemorable day in autumn 2007, I decided that I would never have children.'  (Publication abstract)

'I possess a photograph of myself that was taken near midnight on New Year’s Eve two decades ago. I’m on the dance floor at a nightclub and my then-girlfriend has an arm around my shoulder. She is speaking directly into my ear in a stern and purposeful way, trying to impress good sense into a self-certain young man with bulging muscles, blond tips in his hair and an obscene amount of alcohol in his system. The expression on my face is blank: I can hear what she tells me, but I’m not listening because I’ve already made up my mind. The guy who casually groped her as he squeezed past us moments before is destined to greet the New Year in an inauspicious way.'  (Introduction)

'In Otherland (2010), Maria Tumarkin writes: ‘Humility is a big deal to me…’, and her first three nonfiction books – all of which delve deeply, unapologetically and revealingly into ‘serious’ territories – carry the imprint of that Big Deal, in their conception and tone. Tumarkin has previously approached trauma, genocide, war, loss, guilt, systematic oppression, and survival with exploratory urgency. Her newest book, Axiomatic, is written in the same spirit. Here, Tumarkin has taken Australian society and culture as her chief subject for the first time, attending to very real but not obviously historical crises, while expanding on thematic concerns that run through her body of work. It is her most vital, compressed and compelling book to date.'  (Introduction)