Hilda, a seventeen-year-old living in Los Angeles, is obsessed with dead celebrities. She and her friend Benji collect remnants from sites of tragedy or scandal – bricks, tiles, photographs of bloodstains – material suggestive of the enigmatic past. This ‘trivia’ deadens the things Hilda would rather not think about, including the death of her own parents. Hilda befriends an old man named ... (read more)
Angela Meyer
Angela Meyer is a Melbourne-based writer and reviewer, and the literary blogger for Crikey. She is a doctoral candidate in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, and a former acting editor of Bookseller+Publisher magazine. Her reviews, stories, and articles have appeared in many publications, including the Sydney Morning Herald, Bookslut, AntiTHESIS, Mascara Literary Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Wet Ink, Southerly, Hecate, The Lifted Brow, and Torpedo Greatest Hits.
Faces in the Clouds begins with a drunken soldier arriving at a hospital in which his second son is fighting for breath. The struggle of the soldier’s twin sons, Stephen and Lawrence, continues throughout the novel, from their vividly described early years in an army barracks to their lives as young adults.
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While the stories in The Kid on the Karaoke Stage vary thematically, they are predominantly realist in style, with plenty of seemingly serendipitous through-lines. Georgia Richter, who has edited the collection superbly, says that she was interested in ‘the way we turn to writing to crystallise moments of realisation’. The authors all have links to Western Australia, but their ‘moments of re ... (read more)