Cirrus@Austlit

'As we usher in 2006, the world these days is not so unlike a futuristic Peter Carey story: its borders expand and contract, coincidences abound, vast geographical expanses unravel. The circuits of culture have bizarre dreamscape logics, and time, history, and nation are no longer recognisable in the text-books we once relied upon for guidance and authority. Peter Carey's short-story 'A Windmill in the West' comes to mind: borders are dizzyingly arbitrary, yet nation and empire have direct and pernicious material effects on its main character despite, or perhaps even because of, their randomness. How interesting it is that in this context the first edited collection of critical essays on Carey's work should be produced by a German scholar — Andreas Gaile. Gaile has done a fabulous job editing this peerless international collection of critical essays on Carey's oeuvre. But what are the logics of the literary commodity market, of global critical reception, and coincidence that have produced this long overdue collection in such circumstances? ' (Introduction)

'Wrong About Japan is challenging to review. This is partly a result of the high expectations raised by the appearance of a new Peter Carey book. Another reason is that in this ostensibly non-fictional monograph Carey departs from his customary literary genres, and in doing so takes a number of annoyingly gratuitous liberties with his subject matter and some lazy shortcuts. This leaves some of his loyal readers, including myself, feeling short-changed. ' (Introduction)

'Eight years in the making, The Lost Thoughts Of Soldiers is Delia Falconers' second novel following her debut The Service Of Clouds (1997). The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers takes place in a single morning of 1898 in Georgia. Here, we follow the memories of Frederick Benteen, a captain in General Custer's seventh cavalry during the Plains Indian Wars, as he reflects on the passing of his life; its loves and its regrets, both inextricably shaped by the battle of Little Bighorn where he was the only soldier left alive. General Custer, killed in the battle, has been dead for over twenty years when we meet Captain Benteen, yet Benteen remains haunted by the outcome of the fight, in which Custer was lauded as a hero while Benteen was never forgiven for his survival.' (Introduction)

'Geoff Page's Freehold: Verse Novel attempts to negotiate the different modes in which white and Aboriginal Australians connect to land and country and to counteract the forgetting of historical wrongs perpetrated against Aboriginal communities and 'justified' by white understandings of land ownership. Despite the back cover's claim that 'nothing is black and white', Page reveals that, like the Clarence river which repeatedly cuts into the novel, a sharp divide exists between black and white cultural understandings of land use. This divide in turn, serves to make Aboriginal culture transparent and invisible to white Australia. Page's verse novel attempts to narrow the gap a little.' (Introduction)

'Simon Robb's The Hulk is engaged in multitasking and to read it is to engage in multiskilling. To open its pages is to read fiction, specifically the Gothic genre (or perhaps we should say neo-Gothic); to consider history, specifically an aspect of Australia's unreconciled past; and to play with textuality, with writing and reading.' (Introduction)

'I was drawn to Dorothy Johnston's latest book, The House at Number 10, not only because it's set in Canberra, a place I've called home for almost 20 years, but because it explores Canberra's seedier side and debunks the myth that it's a cold, soulless place. ' (Introduction)

'The Grasshopper Shoe is set in China in the mid nineteenth century, at An Le, an area of China frequently visited by Portuguese, French and English traders. The novel follows the life of Xi Hsiao Yen, the Little Swallow, from just before the point of her feet-first birth. ' (Introduction)

'The remarkable foreign correspondent Wilfred Burchett was given many labels in the mid-twentieth century — traitor, spy, communist sympathiser — but he called himself a heretic.

'He considered heresy to be a trait inherited from his distinguished ancestors, and his passion for heresy was devoid of prejudice: he could celebrate the Eastern bloc heretic Stefan Heym for 'tilting his very able pen at the bureaucratic stupidities ... of the building of socialism', as easily as he lauded the heresies of his American friends disenfranchised by McCarthy. Burchett was generous to such a degree that he was even admired by detractors such as Australian journalist Denis Warner, who in a report quoted by ASIO described him as courageous, careless of his own safety, gifted in languages and with women. The magnitude of Burchett's gifts were not appreciated in Australia during his lifetime, but this epic, global eyewitness account of wars and the struggle for peace in the decades after Hitler should enable us to revisit Burchett more compassionately. '(Introduction)