Fiction
Australia is not the science-fiction capital of the world; in fact we are probably not even on the map. This unfortunate fact would change if we could produce more writers like Paul Collins.
... (read more)Wildlife film-makers Richard Southeby and his wife Nicole Vander are filming a duck hunt at Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina, where Greenpeace demonstrators plan to make their presence felt. Their fanatical leader, Simon Rosenberg, has a flowing beard and deeply troubled eyes. His idea is to get his troops in front of the guns, really provoke the shooters and obtain maximum publicity. Remind you of anyone? But then in the early stages of filming, Nicole is blown away into the swamp by an unseen assassin. Who’s responsible? Greenpeace crazies? Duck hunters? Or an international hired hitman known as the Jaguar? You guessed right.
... (read more)Zach Jones’s début novel, Growing Up in Flames (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 288 pp), unfolds after a tragic bushfire, while an approaching bushfire stalks Carly Nugent’s protagonist Persephone in Sugar (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 368 pp). The only noticeable flames in Allayne Webster’s That Thing I Did (Wakefield Press, $24.95 pb, 336 pp) belong to a foul-mouthed granny named Daisy, who uses them to light her cigarettes, but Webster’s novel about an unlikely group of strangers on a madcap South Australian road trip is as poignant as it is funny.
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In the wake of other recent compelling débuts – Paige Clark’s meticulously crafted and imagined She is Haunted being a standout – three new short story collections, varying markedly in tone, style, and setting, offer bold and unsettling visions of twenty-first-century life.
... (read more)The Burnished Sun (UQP, $29.99 pb, 288 pp) by Mirandi Riwoe, Danged Black Thing (Transit Lounge, $29.99 pb, 240 pp) by Eugen Bacon, and Sadvertising (Vintage, $32.99 pb, 298 pp) by Ennis Ćehić are powerful, inventive, and self-assured short story collections that traverse fractured and contested ground through their often displaced and alienated narrators.
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