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"I found myself considering those rare things only books can do, feats outside the purview of film or fine art . . . Gorgeous." —Samantha Hunt, The New York Times Book Review It is New Year’s Eve 1990, in a small town in southeast Australia. Ru’s father, Jack, one of thousands of Australians once conscripted to serve in the Vietnam War, has disappeared. This time Ru thinks he might be gone for good. As rumors spread of a huge black cat stalking the landscape beyond their door, the rest of the family is barely holding on. Ru’s sister, Lani, is throwing herself into sex, drugs, and dangerous company. Their mother, Evelyn, is escaping into memories of a more vibrant youth. And meanwhile there is Les, Jack’s inscrutable brother, who seems to move through their lives like a ghost, earning both trust and suspicion. A Loving, Faithful Animal is an incandescent portrait of one family searching for what may yet be redeemable from the ruins of war. Tender, brutal, and heart–stopping in its beauty, this novel marks the arrival in the United States of Josephine Rowe, the winner of the 2016 Elizabeth Jolley Prize and one of Australia’s most extraordinary young writers.
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 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
"... powerfully renders what it’s like to live life to the fullest." Publishers Weekly Starred Review My name is Mickey Rowe. I am an actor, a theatre director, a father, and a husband. I am also a man with autism. You think those things don’t go together? Let me show you that they do. Growing up, Mickey Rowe was told that he couldn’t enter the mainstream world. He was iced out by classmates and colleagues, infantilized by well-meaning theatre directors, barred from even earning a minimum wage. Why? Because he is autistic. Fearlessly Different: An Autistic Actor's Journey to Broadway's Biggest Stage is Mickey Rowe’s story of growing up autistic and pushing beyond the restrictions of ...
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 quick read from the bestselling storyteller, Josephine Cox. Love at first sight and a mysterious disappearance.
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.
A latest quarterly anthology by the two-time National Magazine Award-winning literary journal features entries by forefront and up-and-coming writers, as well as an eccentric design.