Elizabeth Bryer
Elizabeth Bryer is the author of From Here On, Monsters (Picador), which was joint winner of the 2020 Norma K Hemming award. She is also a translator from Spanish, including of novels by María José Ferrada, Aleksandra Lun, José Luis de Juan and Claudia Salazar Jiménez.
Smokehouse is an engagingly constructed collection of interlinked stories set in small-town, yet globally connected, settler Tasmania. The volume, which is focused on personal crises and family breakdown, is bookended by the two parts of the novella that lends the collection its name. This splicing is an inspired decision: the end of Part One keeps us turning the pages through the subsequent, full ... (read more)
In perhaps the most tender story in this textured, interconnected collection, an adolescent son spends the summer sunbathing in the backyard and sneaking glances at the paperboy while his working-class, stay-at-home father, who reads detective fiction and likes to ‘figure things out before the endings’, gently attempts to make it known to his son that he can tell him anything.
This develops i ... (read more)
Near the beginning of Bruno Lloret’s stark, unvarnished first novel, Nancy, the cancer-riddled protagonist discovers that her husband has died in a workplace accident, sucked into the tuna processor while drunk. With no body to bury, she imagines having ‘a moment alone with the 2,500 tins containing [him]’.
That unsentimental account issues from a woman habituated to abandonment and plays o ... (read more)
In the winter issue of Meanjin, some of Australia’s best writers, including Sophie Cunningham, Lucy Treloar, and Jennifer Mills, grapple with the climate emergency and our relationship to place in these days of coronavirus and the summer that was.
One of the delights of a literary journal is the way that bringing pieces together can seem to prompt a conversation. Sometimes, however, this highli ... (read more)