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49 stories ranging over 120 years. Stories reflect life in Australia from the early days of hardship to the recognition of a multicultural society and the new agendas for women's, gay and lesbian, and Aboriginal writing.
Henry Lawson · Barbara Baynton ·Henry Handel Richardson · Katharine Susannah Prichard · Christina Stead ·Gavin Casey ·Vance Palmer · Alan Marshall · Marjorie Barnard ·Judah Waten · John Morrison · Peter Cowan · Hal Porter · Patrick White · Thelma Forshaw ·Dal Stivens · Peter Carey Murray Bail · Frank Moorhouse · T.A.G. Hungerford · Elizabeth Jolley · Michael Wilding · Olga Masters · Beverley Farmer · Fay Zwicky · Barry Hill · Gerald Murnane · Archie Weller · Thea Astley · Helen Garner · Lily Brett · Susan Hampton · Gail Jones In this bestselling collection the Australian short story is represented from its Bulletin beginnings to its vigorous revival in the late twentieth century.
Winner, Prize for Fiction, The 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards ‘Melanie Cheng is an astonishingly deft and incisive writer. With economy and elegance, she creates a dazzling mosaic of contemporary life, of how we live now. Hers is a compelling new voice in Australian literature.’ Christos Tsiolkas Australia Day is a collection of stories by debut author Melanie Cheng. The people she writes abut are young, old, rich, poor, married, widowed, Chinese, Lebanese, Christian, Muslim. What they have in common—no matter where they come from—is the desire we all share to feel that we belong. The stories explore universal themes of love, loss, family and identity, while at the same time asking crucial questions about the possibility of human connection in a globalised world. Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. She was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2018. Room for a Stranger is her first novel. ‘A stunning debut that takes its place among Australian short story greats.’ AU Review ‘The book bears witness to the author’s empathetic eye, multicultural characterisation and easy facility with dialogue...This short story collection explores what it means to belong, to be Australian; its insight from different vantage points and its photo-realistic narrative make it an exciting and impressive debut.’ Judges’ Report, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2018 ‘All of her characters—a diverse cast of difference races and faiths—are searching for connection or a sense of belonging, and coming up short. Despite its title the focus of this collection is not explicitly on that increasingly controversial public holiday. Rather, it is on the struggles, internal and external, that occur when people from different backgrounds meet by chance or are brought together...Australia Day is a bittersweet, beautifully crafted collection that will be much admired by fans of Cate Kennedy and Tony Birch.’ Books+Publishing ‘What a wonderful book, a book with bite. These stories have a real edge to them. They are complex without being contrived, humanising, but never sentimental or cloying—and, ultimately, very moving.’ Alice Pung ‘In each story, Melanie Cheng creates an entire microcosm, peeling back the superficial to expose the raw nerves of contemporary Australian society. Her eye is sharp and sympathetic, her characters flawed and funny and utterly believable.’ Jennifer Down ‘Melanie Cheng’s stories are a deep dive into the diversity of humanity. They lead you into lives, into hearts, into unexplored places, and bring you back transformed.’ Michelle Wright ‘The characters stay in the mind, their lives and experiences mirroring many of our own, challenging us to think how we might respond in their place. An insightful, sometimes uncomfortable portrayal of multicultural Australia from an observant and talented writer.’ Ranjana Srivastava ‘If only the PM might pick up a copy, even by mistake.’ Saturday Paper ‘A wonderful feat of storytelling...Melanie Cheng is an exciting new writer.’ Readings ‘A sumptuous collection of fourteen short stories, which are disparate but with modern Australia or Australians at their heart, exploring issues of racism, infidelity, grief, parenthood, children and ageing...they are heartfelt and Melbourne-based Cheng paints the characters beautifully.’ Herald Sun ‘The happy surprise of Cheng’s work as a collection lies in her resolute grasp of the absolute normalcy of a culture that not so many years ago was divided and dually suspicious. The census gives us the facts but it takes fiction to make reality three-dimensional.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘The author’s empathetic eye and easy facility with dialogue make the anthology a strong debut, with the longer stories in particular offering breadth and depth...It feels like Cheng has taken a wide sample from the census to craft this inclusive portrait of contemporary Australia.’ Big Issue‘Cheng’s work is polished and affecting. Australia Day is that thing we all chase: a complex, engaging and timely read.’ Lifted Brow ‘Cheng paints a holistic snapshot of Australian life, with the result being a collection of stories that are simultaneously cynical and hopeful...The ambiguity inherent in labelling something “Australian" is also manifest in Cheng’s characters, prompting the reader to interrogate their own definition of what it means to be Australian.’ Kill Your Darlings ‘Wonderful.’ Christos Tsiolkas, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading ‘Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day brought this prodigal reader of short fiction back into the fold. And what better return than through Cheng’s creation of illuminated characters of colour—young, old, rich, poor, married, widowed, Muslim, Chinese...Cheng’s Australia Day explores the density and difficulty inherent in being culturally and physically different and serves to remind me that when our six families of adopted children from China gather in Queenscliffe on Australia Day each year, raising two flags on the pole instead of one that we, like all of Cheng’s characters, are restoring belonging from our individual and collective loss.’ Wheeler Centre, 2017 Favourites ‘This smart, engaging short story collection offers fresh perspectives on what it means to be Australian today. The stories also explore identity and belonging in a variety of other ways, delving into family, love, class and education. Big themes aside, every story is beautifully written and a total pleasure to read.’ Emily Maguire, Australian Women’s Weekly '[Cheng’s] individual characters suggest the ways in which we might move forward...Australia Day imagines a tomorrow where we can love our communities, our celebrations and our food, without leaving behind critical good taste.’ Sydney Review of Books
In The Best Australian Stories, acclaimed writer Maxine Beneba Clarke brings together our country’s leading literary talents. Herself an award-winning short-story writer, Beneba Clarke selects exceptional stories that resonate with experience and truth, and celebrate the art of storytelling. Previous contributors include Kate Grenville, Tony Birch, David Malouf, Kirsten Tranter, Anna Krien, Georgia Blain, Peter Goldsworthy, Fiona McFarlane, Elizabeth Harrower, Ryan O’Neill and Romy Ash. Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. In 2015 her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the ABIA for Best Literary Fiction and the Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her critically acclaimed memoir, The Hate Race (2016), was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, the Indie Award for Non-Fiction and the Stella Prize. She is also the author of a picture book, The Patchwork Bike (2016), several poetry collections, and is a contributor to the Saturday Paper.
The best of the best This essential book takes a decade of Best Australian Stories and selects the most outstanding short fiction by the country's finest writers. These stories range widely in style and subject matter: there is drama and comedy, subtlety and extravagance, tales of suspense, love, fantasy, grief and revenge. Together they showcas...
‘Garner is a natural storyteller.’ James Wood, New Yorker This handsome edition of Helen Garner’s collected short fiction celebrates the seventy-fifth birthday of one of Australia’s most loved authors. These stories—that delve into the complexities of love and longing, of the pain, darkness and joy of life—are all told with her characteristic sharpness of observation, honesty and humour. Each one a perfect piece, together they showcase Garner’s mastery of the form. Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction. Garner won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction for Postcards from Surfers, and the Victorian and Queensland Premiers’ Awards, as well as the Barbara Jefferis Award, for her novel The Spare Room. Everywhere I Look won the 2017 Indie Book Award for Non Fiction. ‘Garner’s stories share characteristics of the postcard: they flash before us carefully recorded images that remind us of harsher realities not pictured. And like postcards they are economically written, a bit of conversation is transcribed, a memory recalled, an event noted, scenes pass as if viewed from a train—momentarily, distinct and tantalising in their beauty.’ New York Times ‘A perfect introduction for first-timers who have not yet experienced the pleasures of Garner’s writing.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘Stories and True Stories are handsome companion volumes deservedly celebrating Helen Garner, our greatest contemporary practitioner of observation, self-interrogation and compassion. Everything she writes, in her candid, graceful prose, rings true, enlightens, stays.’ Joan London, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading ‘Published in beautiful editions to celebrate life given shape in words.’ Drusilla Modjeska, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading ‘Both of these books are concerned with moments of heartbreak and of hope, with loneliness and love, and with great cruelties, and the things that drive people to them. They are animated by a desire to understand what seems unfathomable, and to pay attention to the small pleasures of the everyday. Garner's precise descriptions, her interest in minute shifts of emotion, and the ways in which we reveal ourselves to others are always at work in these books, and make them a real joy to read.’ Age ‘As I leaf through the volumes, having just re-read both of them, I am still brought up short by another revelatory insight of the everyday...I could go on and on, but I am out of words. Many happy returns Helen Garner!’ Adelaide Advertiser ‘Her prose is wiry, stark, precise, but to find her equal for the tone of generous humanity one has to call up writers like Isaac Babel and Anton Chekhov.’ Wall Street Journal
'The tall trees nearby called them up and red-tailed black cockatoos carried messages to them that they told no one else about.' Pushing Back is John Kinsella's most haunting and timely fiction to date. It is populated with eccentric, compelling characters, drifters, unlikely friendships, the silences of dissolving relationships, haunted dwellings and lonely highways, the ghosts of cleared bushland and the threats of right-wing nationalists and senseless destruction. A couple make love in an abandoned asbestos house, a desperate carpet cleaner beholden to the gig economy begs a financially distressed client not to cancel his booking, an addict cannot bear to see his partner without the watch he once gave her, a mother casts her shearer son's ashes on the property on which he worked, fascists pile into a little red car with the intent of terrorising tourists on the Nullarbor, a man more at home with machinery than people rescues a drowning kitten. Yet throughout this assured distillation of contemporary Australian life, empathy rises like the red- tailed black cockatoos that appear and reappear, nature coalescing with the human spirit, the animals, the trees, the land, the people pushing back. These stories are at once disturbing, tender and hopeful. 'One of the nation's most significant living writers.' — Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Australian Book Review
This brilliant collection mixes the storytelling originality of George Saunders and Lydia Davis with a sensibility all its own, taking the reader on an extraordinary tour of an old and a new Australia. A woman on a passenger ship in 1958 gets involved with a young, wild Barry Humphries. A man looks back to the 1970s and his time as a member of Australia’s least competent scout troop. In 1988, a teenage boy recalls his sexual initiation, out on the tanbark. In 2015, two sisters text in Kmart about how to manage their irascible, isolated mum. Then, in the near future, a racist demagogue addresses the press the day after his electoral triumph. As the cities heat up and lose their water, a lady from one of the ‘better suburbs’ makes every effort to get her family into an exclusive gated community. Outstandingly original, bitingly satirical and written in a remarkable range of voices, A Couple of Things Before the End is a powerful vision of where we are – and where we may be headed. ‘These voices, so superbly heard and rendered, threw me into fits of laughter and slyly broke my heart.’ —Helen Garner ‘Astonishing ... an inventive collection of missives from the end of history. Complicated and savage and difficult and funny and melancholy, it’s both harsh and a caress. How do we speak and write into a future? I think Sean O’Beirne is showing us one way of doing it.’ —Christos Tsiolkas ‘O’Beirne inflects his identifiably Australian characters with a darkly comic and empathetic voice ... altogether, this collection invokes [our] questionable past, ironic present and disturbing future.’ —Books+Publishing
"This ... novel evokes the hardships and the glories of Sydney's past and tells the little-known story of those made homeless to make way for the famous bridge"--Back cover.
In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world. The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Colombia; from an ageing New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing tow...