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Edited by Louise Swinn, Choice Words is a timely collection of stories, essays, rants and raves from high profile women that seeks to demystify abortion and its surrounding stigma.
Every year, Sleepers assembles a motley crue of new and established (but mostly new - mostly never heard of) writers for their critically acclaimed collection of short fiction (with occasional miscellany): The Sleepers Almanac. This year sees new stories from people the eds had previously not heard of, including the incredibly talented likes of Isabelle Li and Julie Koh. But there are names that might be familiar, too, to those who love short stories: Brad Bryant, Pierz Newton-John, or Sian Prior, perhaps better known for her journalism, but proving that she knows how to wrangle a story too. What makes the Almanac different is its breadth. The Almanac, which focuses on new and emerging authors, is the result of a slush-pile read, where writers from all over the country have been encouraged to send in stories up to 10,000 words long.
The inaugural winner of The Novel Prize, an international biennial award established by Giramondo (Australia), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and New Directions (USA). Cold Enough for Snow was unanimously chosen from over 1500 entries. A novel about the relationship between life and art, and between language and the inner world – how difficult it is to speak truly, to know and be known by another, and how much power and friction lies in the unsaid, especially between a mother and daughter. A young woman has arranged a holiday with her mother in Japan. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen for their art and architecture, eat together in small cafés and restaurants and walk ...
A wealthy business tycoon is haunted by his past and is rapidly running out of options as he struggles to make amends.
A biting collection of stories from a bold new voice. A young girl sees ghosts from her third eye, located where her belly button should be. A corporate lawyer feels increasingly disconnected from his job in a soulless 1200-storey skyscraper. And a one-dimensional yellow man steps out from a cinema screen in the hope of leading a three-dimensional life, but everyone around him is fixated only on the color of his skin. Welcome to Portable Curiosities. In these dark and often fantastical stories, Julie Koh combines absurd humour with searing critiques on modern society, proving herself to be one of Australia's most original and daring young writers.
Gender and Prestige in Literature: Contemporary Australian Book Culture explores the relationship between gender, power, reputation and book publishing’s consecratory institutions in the Australian literary field from 1965-2015. Focusing on book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes, this work analyses the ways in which these institutions exist in an increasingly cooperative and generative relationship in the contemporary publishing industry, a system designed to limit field transformation. Taking an intersectional approach, this research acknowledges that a number of factors in addition to gender may influence the reception of an author or a title in the literary field and finds that progress towards equality is unstable and non-linear. By combining quantitative data analysis with interviews from authors, editors, critics, publishers and prize judges Alexandra Dane maps the circulation of prestige in Australian publishing, addressing questions around gender, identity, literary reputation, literary worth and the resilience of the status quo that have long plagued the field.
The incandescent new novel from the acclaimed Miles Franklin winner author of The Eye of the Sheep and The Choke. WINNER OF THE 2021 COLIN RODERICK AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD Lawrence Loman is a bright, caring, curious boy with a gift for painting. He lives at home with his mother and younger brother, and the future is laid out before him, full of promise. But when he is ten, an experience of betrayal takes it all away, and Lawrence is left to deal with the devastating aftermath. As he grows into a man, how will he make sense of what he has suffered? He cannot rewrite history, but must he be condemned to repeat it? Lawrence finds meaning in the best way he kn...
Sarah Sweet is a watcher. She sees the way the smoke rises from the sulphide works to wreath the little Australian town of Boolaroo; she watches Dad, when he's not being a policeman, breaking horses in the back paddock behind the house. Sarah has learnt to observe, to be quiet, to avoid notice, filled with a fury so intense it threatens to overwhelm her. The Breaking is the story of a family tainted by the force of rage, of a young life haunted by it, but also of the strength it gives to fight back. In its evocation of the parched landscape of rural Australia, the strange cadences of the language and the filmic vividness of its characters, The Breaking is a unique, lyrical testament to the p...
A story of unshakeable belief and unbending faith from the author of The Deceptions. 'The Watchful Wife is assured and engrossing. As our crisp, clear-eyed narrator with more than one cross to bear, Ellen guides us through a tangle of ethical and emotional quandaries that feel both timeless and immediate, keeping us on her side the whole way through.' Jacqueline Bublitz, author of Before You Knew My Name 'Leal's unusual perspective on the destructive force of an allegation gives this book real moral complexity…Nuanced, troubling and convincing.' Jock Serong, author of The Settlement Raised by her severe parents in a punitive and authoritarian church, Ellen's narrow world is upended when sh...
The World Is Not Big Enough is the story of one woman’s journey to understand the human side of a broken system. At once an investigation into the murder of a refugee and a compassionate exploration of who he was, The World Is Not Big Enough exposes the ways we are all affected by Australia’s migration policies and their history. In 2013, on a whim Vanessa Russell googled Ahmad Shah Abed, an Afghan asylum seeker she had exchanged letters with a decade earlier, to find he had been murdered in 2009. The news came as a shock. Ahmad Shah had been living in detention in Port Hedland when Vanessa had first started writing to him as a student hoping to do some good. Their relationship had been ...