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MidnightSun

We Will Live and Then We Will See by Warwick Sprawson & Big Weird Lonely Hearts by Allen C. Jones

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April 2024, no. 463
Debra Adelaide reviews ‘We Will Live and Then We Will See’ by Warwick Sprawson, ‘Big Weird Lonely Hearts’ by Allen C. Jones, and ‘The Carnal Fugues’ by Catherine McNamara

Over the years the popularity of short fiction has fluctuated greatly, for mysterious reasons. A senior publisher once told me that publishers loved short fiction collections but that the reason they rarely published them was due to booksellers’ reluctance to support them. When I put this to a major bookseller, they claimed it was the other way around.

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Feast by Emily O'Grady & Missing Pieces by Jennifer Mackenzie Dunbar

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August 2023, no. 456
Diane Stubbings reviews three new novels

British sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote that ‘there is no landscape without the human figure’. Similarly, there is no human without the landscape in which they are situated, human and landscape mutually shaping, resisting and defining the other.

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Four auspicious début collections by Mandy Beaumont, Dominic Carew, Wayne Marshall, and Sean O'Beirne

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April 2020, no. 420

The American writer Jack Matthews had no time for what he called ‘a discontent’ with the brevity of the short story. ‘Ask a coral snake,’ he declared, ‘which is as deadly as it is small.’ The claim for ‘deadliness’ certainly applies to four recent début collections; in the tight spaces of the short story, each one presents confronting ideas about contemporary Australia.

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