Anthology

The Best Australian Stories 2012 edited by Sonya Hartnett

Item: The Best Australian Stories 2012
Author: Cassandra Atherton

by Cassandra Atherton •

February 2013, no. 348

Black Inc., $29.99 pb, 369 pp, 9781863955805

Anthology

The Best Australian Stories 2012 edited by Sonya Hartnett

by Cassandra Atherton •

February 2013, no. 348

Sonya Hartnett’s début as editor of The Best Australian Stories is marked by a series of fictions about dysfunctional families, eccentrics, and misfits. The homeless, lonely, disenfranchised, intellectually disabled, sick, afflicted, even the dead, are featured alongside the privileged, rich, and famous in a macabre mardi gras. Readers familiar with Hartnett’s writing will recognise many of her own carnivalesque qualities.

Cassandra Atherton

Cassandra Atherton is a poet and scholar. She is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She was a Harvard Visiting Fellow in English and a Visiting Scholar in Comparative Culture at Sophia University, Tokyo. She is writing a book of prose poetry on the atomic bomb with funding from an Australia Council grant.