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* The Story Prize Spotlight Award, Winner * Tasmanian Literary Awards, Longlist * Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, Shortlist * Queensland Literary Awards – University of Southern Queensland Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection, Shortlist * Age Book of the Year award, Finalist * An ABA Indie Next pick for “Great New Reads” for August. * "A Best Native Book of 2021" —The Tribal College Journal * "A Best Book of the Year" —Independent Book Review * An ABA Indie Next pick for “Great New Reads” for August. * "A Best Native Book of 2021" —The Tribal College Journal * "A Best Book of the Year" —Independent Book Review The remarkable stories in Born Into This ar...
A dark and funny new novel from the multi-award-winning author of Mullumbimby.Too much lip, her old problem from way back. And the older she got, the harder it seemed to get to swallow her opinions. The avalanche of bullshit in the world would drown her if she let it; the least she could do was raise her voice in anger.Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent a lifetime avoiding two things – her hometown and prison. But now her Pop is dying and she's an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley.Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, over the border. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of grabbing on to people. Old family wounds open as the Salters fight to stop the development of their beloved river. And the unexpected arrival on the scene of a good-looking dugai fella intent on loving her up only adds more trouble – but then trouble is Kerry's middle name.Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seems possible.
This daring and dazzling debut shines a light on the unsung heroes of our communities: the carers. Jay is devoted to the care of her teenage twins who view the world as differently as it views them. Frank is sweet, sensitive and bullied, while whip-smart Teddy needs an iPad to speak. With an absent husband and battling a nightmare bureaucracy, Jay leans heavily on Keep, her lifelong half-real friend. But in the corner of her eye lurks her mother, and a childhood Jay knows she can't ever outrun. Jay believes she is managing quite well, with a half-grip on this half-life of hers. That is, until Teddy starts to get sick, refusing to eat, while doctors refuse to listen, confounding everything Jay thought she knew about what lies ahead. The Keepers is an incredible and fiercely honest novel about the damage done by parents who can't love, the failures of a community that only claims to care, and the resilience of those whose stories mostly go untold.
Joey is young, indifferent. He's drifting around Western Sydney unaware that his passivity is leading him astray. And then one day he is involved in a violent crime, one that threatens to upend his life entirely. Elaine, his grandmother, is a proud Lebanese woman with problems of her own. When Joey is arrested, she is desperate to save face and hold herself together. In her family, history repeats itself, vices come and go, and uncovering long-buried secrets isn't always cathartic. This gripping and hard-hitting novel reveals the richness and complexity of contemporary Australian life and tests the idea that facing consequences will make us better people.
Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia. In the 21st century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the 20th century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global. The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: 'National literatures and transnationalism', 'Poetry and poetics', 'Literature and popular culture', 'The Cold War', and 'Publishing history and transpacific print cultures'.
The power of history written down can be both lethal and deceptive, and that has long-lasting effects, both for those writing and those being written about. In this groundbreaking work of Indigenous scholarship, nationally renowned visual artist Fiona Foley addresses the inherent silences, errors and injustices from the perspective of her people, the Badtjala of K'gari (Fraser Island). She shines a critical light on the little-known colonial-era practice of paying Indigenous workers in opium and the 'solution' of then displacing them to K'gari. Biting the Clouds - a euphemism for being stoned on opium - combines historical, personal and cultural imagery to reclaim the Badtjala story from the colonisation narrative. Full-colour images of Foley's artwork add further impact to this important examination of Australian history.
Visual and performance artist, and winner of the inaugural Kill Your Darlings Manuscript Award, SJ Norman turns their hand to fiction with spectacular results. Permafrost explores the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing. Inverting and queering the gothic and romantic traditions, each story represents a different take on the concept of a haunting or the haunted. Though it ranges across themes and locations &– from small-town Australia to Hokkaido to rural England &– this collection is united by the power of the narratorial voice, with its auto-fictional resonances, dark wit and swagger. Whether recounting the confusion of a child trying to decipher their father and stepmother's new relationship, the surrealness of an after-hours tour of Auschwitz, or a journey to wintry Japan to reconnect with a former lover, Permafrost unsettles, transports and impresses in equal measure.
The original, unforgettable and thought-provoking new novel by award-winning author Chris Flynn that will change how readers understand the world. Narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct mammoth, this is the (mostly) true story of how a collection of prehistoric creatures came to be on sale at a natural history auction in New York in 2007. By tracing how and when these fossils were unearthed, Mammoth leads us on a funny and fascinating journey from the Pleistocene epoch to nineteenth-century America and beyond, revealing how ideas about science and religion have shaped our world. With our planet on the brink of calamitous climate change, Mammoth scrutinises humanity's role in the destruction of the natural world while also offering a message of hope.
A thrilling, multi award-winning, teen ghost story, from a First Nations Australian author, drawing on the culture and beliefs of her close-knit community. Stacey and Laney are twins and mirror images of each other but as different as the sun and the moon. Stacey wants to go places, do things and be someone different while Laney just wants to skip school and sneak out of the house to meet her boyfriend Troy. When Laney doesn't come home one night, the town assumes she's just doing her normal run-off but Stacey's gut tells her different.Stacey knows her twin isn't dead - she just doesn't know where she is; she can see her in her dreams but doesn't know if she is real or imagined. Holding onto the words her Nan taught her is one thing but listening to those around you is another - who will Stacey trust? As the town starts to believe that Laney is missing for good, can she find her twin in time?'Part coming-of-age story, part "Romeo and Juliet" romance, part speculative fiction, part Aboriginal spiritual revelation, part mystery - this is a story that is mature on many levels.' ReadPlus
A dazzling collection of essays that unpacks our unruly bodies and minds and questions why we are taught to fear and punish them, from an exciting and award-winning new author. We live in a world that expects us to be constantly in control of ourselves. Our bodies and minds, though, have other ideas. In this striking debut, artist and writer Sarah Walker wrestles with the awkward spaces where anatomy meets society: body image and Photoshop, phobias and religion, sex scenes and onstage violence, death and grief. Her luminous writing is at once specific and universal as she mines the limits of anxiety, intimacy and control. Sharp-witted and poignant, this collection of essays explores our unruly bodies and asks how we might learn to embrace our own chaos.