'The invasion of East Timor, the sinking of the Titanic, Freud's encounter with an "imbecile dwarf," astronomy, pregnancy, Tiananmen Square, a remote Aboriginal community: these historical episodes and narratives inspire the fourteen superb and engaging short stories in The House of Breathing, winner of four major Australian literary prizes. Concerned with the extremes of human experience, Jones's stories give fictional form to a wide range of philosophical concerns: cultural imperialism, political and sexual repression, the impact of modern technology on culture and consciousness.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (US ed.)
'This ficto-critical response to “The House of Breathing” comprises an exploration of the hyphen between one world and another, and a reading of one writer’s fictional reincarnation of the forever sunken Titanic juxtaposed with my own writerly reading of drowning and its concomitant presence in transatlantic discourse, brought together by the narrative of haunting itself. Australian writer Gail Jones’s short story incites this analysis but also demands that as a Canadian critic/writer investigating Jones’s story, I must provide an inter-textual narrative that takes up the necessity of reincarnating an individual crossing and its private reverberation within the larger metanarrative of immigration. This is not a conventional paper, but a recuperation of haunting, and a re-haunting of migration’s intricate outcome. This ficto-critique partakes of a crossing and hyphenated crossover, and in the process, unpacks how fictions of modernity have learned to breathe under water instead of drowning.' (Introduction)
