Text Publishing

The title of The Empusium, the newly translated work by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is an invention. It is a portmanteau that fuses masculine and feminine literary allusions: first, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken Athenian banquet in which great statesmen give speeches on the nature of love; second, the empusa, a shape-shifting female demon who, according to Greek mythology, had the sirenic ability to lure and prey upon young men.

It is rare to encounter spacecraft in nature writing. Indeed, most definitions of nature confine it to Earth’s boundaries. A few pages into Lauren Fuge’s book, we are treated to the image of two Voyager space probes, more than sixteen billion kilometres from the Earth and ‘driven by the most ecstatic imaginings of human exploration’. This is a mark of Fuge’s ambition. She is as comfortable crossing the frontiers of interstellar space as she is describing oystercatchers pattering feather-light in the sand.

Recent decades have seen no shortage of what might broadly be called diasporic Australian novels. Works by Brian Castro and Michelle de Kretser, among others, come to mind. Raeden Richardson adds fruitfully to this tradition with his complex début novel, The Degenerates, which sets out from then-Bombay and journeys to the streets of Melbourne and New York. It is not quite a ‘constellation novel’ (the term coined by Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk), in which textual fragments and polyphonic voices build a narrative. Richardson nevertheless offers a series of story threads that slowly accumulate and nudge the boundaries of conventional form and storytelling.

This volume brings together two highly credentialled thinkers about moral and ethical matters: Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist nun, founder of the animal welfare organisation the Life Conservation Association and the Buddhist Hong-Shi College, as well as a lecturer at Hsuan Chuang University.

It is 1992, the year of the Mabo judgment, and Helen, a scholarship student from Tasmania, is undertaking a PhD at Cambridge, writing a thesis titled ‘Cryptomodernism and Empire’. It is on Joseph Conrad, a writer about whom her peers are contemptuous. Helen is dealing with a forlorn and dismissive supervisor, and the disappointment that her experience abroad was not what she had expected. Her ‘fantasy of vigorous literary talk, multisyllabic and theoretical, was soon defeated’.

Transformation is one thing. Conversion is another. With its Latin roots con (with or together) and vertere (to turn or bend), conversion is haunted by a sense of coercion, the imposition of one will over another. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, conversion comes in the form of Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter’s evangelistic tutor, Doris Kilman, the violence of colonialism, and brutish attempts by psychologist Sir William Bradshaw to instil ‘a sense of proportion’ into his vulnerable patients. Sir William gets what he wants. He ‘shuts people up’ under the auspices of ‘the twin goddesses of conversion and proportion’. Converting, for Woolf, means ‘to override opposition’. 

Megalodon, the famed prehistoric shark, is the stuff of legends. Their huge teeth – as big as the palm of a hand – fuel unquenchable rumours of their continued survival, a plethora of implausible YouTube videos, and the devoted fascination of a legion of children.

The best literary short fiction gives the author an opportunity to stretch their limbs from poetry into abstraction, painting emotion in words without the need to make figurative or even internal sense. The story does not need to be a medium for delivering ‘story’, as such, but can become a container of emotion, for the feelings the artist intends to deliver. The emotion delivered by literary fiction teaches us to feel empathy for the characters, making the short form an effective empathy delivery vehicle.

In her short life, Lesbia Harford (1891–1927) created a body of poems which have become increasingly important to scholars and poets in understanding both the impact of poetic modernism in Australia and shifting concepts of gender, class, and the tensions between a personal and a collective politics. While Oliver Dennis’s 2014 Collected Poems of Lesbia Harford presents Harford’s full oeuvre, the new Text Classics edition, selected and introduced by Gerald Murnane, brings a sharp and accessible focus on this seminal Australian poet, highlighting her key themes and demonstrating a literary style that straddled worlds: from the formal structures and decorous themes of late nineteenth-century poetry to the challenges to form, voice, and subject matter that characterised the emerging revolutions of literary modernism.