For ex-Orangeman Billy, history is a nightmare from which he’s trying to get a good night’s sleep. Haunted by ‘all the bloody faces of Catholic lads I done over and worse’, he’s an exile in Thailand, regularly numbing himself with cheap sex, beer, and the occasional fight. He claims he’s never seen the sunrise sober in his life. Things are about to change.

As Christos Tsiolkas notes in his back cover puff, Tony Birch’s storytelling skills have been widely acknowledged since the publication of Shadowboxing in 2006. Many people have been waiting to see how Birch would fare with a full-length novel. His début, Blood, is nothing short of outstanding. Birch has finally found a home at University of Queensland Press, where he has his staunch champion, John Hunter, who published Birch’s previous book of short fiction, Father’s Day (2009) under his own imprint, Hunter.

Emmett Stinson has been fiction editor of Adelaide’s Wet Ink magazine since its conception, and came to prominence when his story ‘All Fathers the Father’ won The Age Short Story Competition in 2004. That story is included here in his first collection, as are ‘The Russians are Leaving’ and ‘Great Extinctions in History’, which appeared in the Sleeper’s Almanac in 2007 and 2008, respectively. More recently, Stinson’s story ‘Clinching’ was included in the inaugural edition of Kill Your Darlings. A compendium of his short fiction has thus been in the offing for some time, and it came as little surprise to see his name on the list of writers Affirm Press is showcasing in its interesting new short story series.

A Norwegian giant stands astride the deck of a whaling ship trapped in the Arctic ice, watching the other vessels in the fleet burn. Axe in hand, he patiently awaits the arrival of some disgruntled Eskimos, whom he expects to have to fight. Plagued by visions of a lost love, the Norseman commits the tale of his violent life to paper. One hundred and forty years later, a gaunt, dishevelled man climbs into Farrell’s taxi. He carries with him a box containing an ancient woman’s head, a dildo carved from whalebone and the journal of Ole Olavssen, the Norseman. The decrepit man, Bob Kilmartin, instructs Farrell to drive. Despite having just been beaten up by a transvestite colleague on Collins Street, Farrell obliges, desperate for the fare.

Painter Dmitri Pangalidis stares out over the baking Sydney rooftops as he waits for his partner, Choosy McBride, to come home from the gallery where she works as a curator. The city is besieged by heat and Pangalidis spends his day lounging on the couch, trying to motivate himself. The first five pages of The Silence contain no dialogue, with Pangalidis wasting yet another day at home, frustrated and filled with doubt about his art. These scenes are interspersed with those of McBride’s arduous return to the apartment across the city. Once the characters do speak, Bruce Mutard’s stark, contemplative meditation on art and beauty sets an unsettling tone that is maintained throughout.