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In short vignettes and longer stories, Josephine Rowe explores the idea of things that are left behind: souvenirs, scars, prejudice. These beautifully wrought, bittersweet stories capture everyday life in restrained poetic prose, merging themes of collective memory and guilt, permanence and impermanence, and inherited beliefs. A mother moves north with her young children who watch her and try to decipher her buried grief. Two photographers document a nation’s guilt in pictures of its people’s hands. An underground club in Western Australia plays jazz to nostalgic patrons dreaming of America’s Deep South. A young woman struggles to define herself among the litter of objects an ex-lover has left behind.
A haunting and vivid novel which excavates an Australia rarely seen in literature. New Year's Eve, 1990, small-town Australia. The mysterious death of the family dog pushes Jack, a Vietnam veteran suffering from severe PTSD, into one of his periodic vanishing acts. His eccentric brother Les remains next door, a gentle fixer-upper, whose loyalties are increasingly torn between Jack and his wife Evelyn. This time, Evelyn lets Jack stay gone. She is rapidly disappearing herself, lost in recollections of a vibrant youth as her eldest daughter Lani seems intent on misspending her own. And at the heart of it all is Lani's little sister Ru, who sees everything and yet is overlooked. A Loving, Faithful Animal is an unforgettable interrogation of ruins, redemption and reasons why.
A masterful collection of horizons and departures, heartbreak and seduction, from an internationally acclaimed Australian author. These superbly crafted stories follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are travelling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. We meet them navigating reluctant partings and uncertain returns or biding the disquieting calm that often precedes decisive action. An agoraphobic French émigré watches terrorist videos compulsively as she minds a dog named Chavez. A young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings-on of their neighbours than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. A Western Australian fa...
Beverley Farmer’s novels and short stories focus on loss, migration and homecoming. In this beautifully hewn essay, fellow novelist and short-story writer Josephine Rowe finds a kindred spirit and argues for a celebration and reclamation of this long-neglected Australian writer. In the Writers on Writers series, leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and well-written, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work. The Writers on Writers series is published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.
A person will go blind if they stare at eh sun for too long. She learnt this when she was very young and tried to reverse the process by turning her face towards the warmth of it and waiting. Wondering what people who were not blind dreamed about. A father teaches his daughter how to break whiskey bottles. A woman looks for an old lover in a satellite photograph. A man finds the voice of his dead wife on an unlabelled cassette tape. A blind girl dreams about the taste of the moon. In these stories, Josephine Rowe takes the briefest moments and makes them matter. 'Josephine Rowe has an ability to capture the core emotional truth of a given moment in such a simple poetic way.' ANNIE CLARKSON, THE SHORT REVIEW
Ten years in the writing, The Bone House is an extended meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind, composed of three long essays, each based on a single theme, and woven out of the elemental symbols of earth, and water, fire and blood, light and darkness.What does art know that we do not? Alongside the urge to grasp the world, to abstract and to delve, is the urge to make our visions known, to fix the moment in time in its fullness of meaning. The Bone House presents these moments in the form of a mosaic made from myth, poetry and fable, from relics of the past, from explorations and illuminations and surface impressions. Set out like a commonplace book, the essays can be read in any sequence, or savoured for their detail.
In this award-winning work of fiction, Ellen van Neerven leads readers on a journey that is mythical, mystical and still achingly real. Over three parts, van Neerven takes traditional storytelling and gives it a unique, contemporary twist. In 'Heat', we meet several generations of the Kresinger family and the legacy left by the mysterious Pearl. In 'Water', a futuristic world is imagined and the fate of a people threatened. In 'Light', familial ties are challenged and characters are caught between a desire for freedom and a sense of belonging. Heat and Light is an intriguing collection that heralded the arrival of a major new talent in Australian writing.
A thrilling rush of a book about the mysterious body of a child saint and the lives it touches across time. Little World opens with the body of a child saint stranded in the Australian desert. Her name is unknown, as is the story of her life and the status of her canonization. She arrives in a box made of canoe timber, and Orrin Bird is dressed in his best clothes to receive her. As the novel sweeps across time and place, from the 1950s to the present day, we encounter the long shadow of the saint in many forms, revealed section by section: from the retired engineer who unwittingly becomes her custodian, to a woman driving across the Nullarbor Plain in the mid-1970s with a pair of young lovers and haunted by the forced adoption of her only child many years before, and ending in contemporary Victoria. As we follow the lives the child saint touches across time, what is revealed is a haunting reflection on violence and the interdependency of all things. Little World is a dazzling feat by one of Australia's finest writers.
At the beginning of the homelessness epidemic in the 1980s, Josephine Ensign was a young, white, Southern, Christian wife, mother, and nurse running a new medical clinic for the homeless in the heart of the South. Through her work and intense relationships with patients and co-workers, her worldview was shattered, and after losing her job, family, and house, she became homeless herself. She reconstructed her life with altered views on homelessness—and on the health care system. In Catching Homelessness, Ensign reflects on how this work has changed her and how her work has changed through the experience of being homeless—providing a piercing look at the homelessness industry, nursing, and our country’s health care safety net.
The balance of power in a marriage shifts, with shocking consequences. An elderly woman recounts a chilling childhood memory on the family farm. A taxi driver with a missing wife reveals unexpected skills. An inherited painting brings an eerily troubling legacy.Subtle, compelling and unsettling, Amanda O'Callaghan's stories work at the edges of the sayable, through secrets, erasures and glimpsed moments of disclosure. They shimmer with unspoken histories and characters who have a &‘taste for silence'