Panthers and the Museum of Fire is a novella about walking, memory and writing. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney cafe to return a manuscript by a recently-dead writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator's entire world: life with family and neighbours, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance through a brus ...
This anthology harvests the voices of writers from all over the world, in fictional reflection on what the world to come looks like from where they are writing, in place and in time. Editors Patrick West and Om Prakash Dwivedi have selected stories across a range of genres that will surprise, delight, enthrall and even horrify. ...
Cracking the Spine is not just a deftly curated overview of the contemporary Australian short story, including pieces by ten of the best practitioners at work today. The auto-critical essays that accompany each work gesture even more widely. Literature, life, landscape, history: the whole gamut of Antipodean experience may be gleaned from its pages. An ideal resource for those interested in Ozlit, Cracking the Spine is also a pure pleasure to re ...
Whoring Around, a novella in six stories.<br /> <br />Prologue<br />Blowing It<br />Between Whores<br />Dreaming of Glory<br />A Sense of Propriety<br /> <br />More and more we lunched at his tennis club. He had recently become its honorary treasurer. I remember an afternoon, with the washed blues and faint yellows of early winter, when we ate on the terrace. The stonework was damp where the sun ha ...
A volume, four stories of Enric, his boyhood as a child undercover agent in the Spanish Resistance to Fascist rule after the Civil War. Fiction based on the true life of Enric Torres, narrator in the novel To the Death, Amic<br /> <br />Hospice<br />Enric, the boy of To the Death, Amic works as a smuggler for The Organisation, the resistance movement in Barcelona. From France, over the high country, he brings in ammunition, lea ...
A World This Size. You will have a restaurant like this in your city. And, if you have spent time eating alone in restaurants, you will have felt the reverie of the imagination, which will cause you to scrutinise other diners for clues to their personalities and attribute to them lives you could find interesting. This is the story here. A little Baroque music struts overhead. Here a man sits by himself. He is waiting on a martini. His fingers d ...
Stories of Laughter and Lament, set among the filthy rich and the dirt poor, seven stories first selected and published by Penguin Books.<br /> <br />Widows<br />Charles Rand fell off his yacht, somewhere in the middle of the bay, on one of the first pale blue evenings of autumn. Later, the Coroner would be unable to fix that time more precisely than between six and ten o'clock. Newspapers, reporting that he had sailed off ...
Follow the adventures of Mr Farmhand as he negotiates a rural existence in New Jersey, staving off the attentions of Mavis Eggwhistle, staying one step ahead of Frank Winkler and steering clear of Farmer Bart Brassica's pitchfork. His is a world full of unexpected dangers, from the odd satirical skirmish to the surprise philosophical poke in the eye, where gossip takes centre stage and life is lived on the margins. It's a tough gig, bu ...
Once upon a time, in a land Down Under, from the depths of the Clan cave, Clan Destine Press issued a challenge to Australian and Kiwi authors to write cliff-hanging, Australian-flavoured, action-packed adventure stories for two protagonists; stories of the What If, What Now, And Then… kind.<br /> <br />This was a catnip call, an irresistible lure, a kid-in-a-candy-store kind of a challenge: what writer wouldn't want to take a c ...
