Dry Land extract   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 Dry Land
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

The rain won’t stop falling. Suburbs are being flooded and washed away. A government representative travels to sinking areas to encourage people to leave before it’s too late.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Things We Didn't See Coming Steven Amsterdam , Collingwood : Sleepers Publishing , 2009 Z1564576 2009 selected work short story (taught in 3 units)

    Nine connected stories, ' Things We Didn't See Coming follows a man over three decades as he tries to survive - and to retain his humanity - in a world savaged by successive cataclysmic events.

    Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid which signals the world's transformation and decline. In the wake of this develop strange, sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny circumstances as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harassed (and possibly infected) by a man wracked with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of 'the state'; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips.

    Yet despite the violence and brutality of these days, we learn that even as the world is spinning out of control essential human impulses still hold sway - that we never entirely escape our parents, envy the success of those around us and, chiefly, that we crave love' (Harvill Secker website).

    Collingwood : Sleepers Publishing , 2009
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Best Australian Stories 2009 Delia Falconer (editor), Melbourne : Black Inc. , 2009 Z1652008 2009 anthology short story extract (taught in 2 units) 'After searching high and low for the year's outstanding short fiction, Delia Falconer has selected masterful stories from some of the country's best-loved authors and exciting work from the up-and-coming. 'Stories don't have the novel's luxury of great swathes of time, its layerings, its wanderings, its counterpoints,' she observes. 'Instead, they must cut to the bone straightaway ... Sometimes they capture a shift in a whole world; at other times they put into words a mood or tone that we might not have seen, until it appears so beautifully before us. ' With their wry humor, quiet intensity and elegant economy, these stories display Australian writing at its diverse, unpredictable best.' (Publication summary) Melbourne : Black Inc. , 2009 pg. 253-268
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Best Australian Stories : A Ten Year Collection Collingwood : Black Inc. , 2011 Z1771915 2011 anthology short story (taught in 1 units) Collingwood : Black Inc. , 2011 pg. 184-198
Last amended 18 Jun 2019 08:52:12
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