The Boatman and Other Stories by Billy O'Callaghan

$32.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories

The prize-winning Irish short story writer and author of the highly praised novel My Coney Island Baby delivers his most accomplished book of short fiction to date. A poignant story collection that "grips from the opening page" (Bernard MacLaverty).Twelve poignant, quietly dazzling and carefully crafted stories that explore the resiliency of the human heart and its ability to keep beating in the wake of bereavement, violence, lost love, and incomparable trauma and grief.Spanning a century and two continents, from the muddy fields of Ireland to a hotel room in Paris, a dingy bar in Segovia to an airplane bound for Taipei, The Boatman and Other Stories follows an unforgettable cast of characters. Three gunshots on the Irish border define the course of a young man's life; a writer clings fast to a star-crossed affair with a woman who has never been fully in his reach; a fisherman accustomed to hard labor rolls up his sleeves to dig a grave for his child; a pair of newly-weds embark on their first adventure, living wild on the deserted Beginish Island. Ranging from the elegiac to the brutally confrontational, these densely layered tales reveal the quiet heroism and gentle dignity of ordinary life. Billy O'Callaghan is a master celebrant of the smallness of the human flame against the dark: its strength, and its steady brightness. ...Show more

Life of the Party - Poems by Olivia Gatwood

$29.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories

A dazzling collection of raw and explosive poems from a thrilling new feminist voice. In this multi-faceted collection of odes, anecdotes, sonnets and prose, Olivia Gatwood weaves together the trials and triumphs of growing up and explores the many ways that fear and violence can be internalized in a w oman's psyche. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party is about what it means to be a girl and a woman in today's world and the challenge of briefly being both. In powerful, piercingly candid language, Gatwood asks- How does one grow from a girl to a woman in a world wracked by violence? What happens to our bodies that make us who we are? Is this fear really irrational? ...Show more

Jungle Without Water by Sreedhevi Iyer

$24.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories

This debut short story collection from an Australian author delves into the shifting boundaries and human displacement of our era. Of Indian-Malaysian background, Sreedhevi Iyer is adept at locating tensions within her own diaspora while also casting a forensic eye on Australian social and cultural atti tudes. A teacher of creative writing at RMIT and the University of Melbourne, Iyer has a gift for radiant prose, but also an astonishing range of voices, from simple riffs on backyard suburbia to the magic realism of a narrative told by a "divine" coconut. Her sharp wit and sense of irony keep stories of refugees, inter-racial tension and human prejudice profoundly in our sights. ...Show more

Lost Words by Xavier Hennekinne; Phil Day (Drawings by)

$24.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

$22.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories

A creator of virtual memories struggles to distinguish real-life experience from manufactured events. A childless couple conceive two children in an online world, only for their imagined life to be infected by a computer virus. The robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child 'dies', and a family realise s how real a son he had become. Alexander Weinstein's debut story collection, Children of the New World, imagines a near future of social-media implants and instant connection, environmental collapse and post-revolution discord. It grapples with our unease in the modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon. ...Show more

Amnesia Findings by Anna Jacobson

$24.95 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories | Series: UQP Poetry Ser.

Now I knit myself back into a human. It's hard work relearning the steps - slip-stitch, drop-stitch, pick-up stitch, loop. I get into a rhythm. The pattern is complex - I drop a few stitches. The holes form gaps in my memory. Knitting visions and memories, Anna Jacobson's collection traces the skeins o f lost histories and the spaces of dropped stitches. Exquisite and whimsical, these poems bear witness to the broken and healed. Gentle but robust, these are poems of personal resilience, framed by explorations of Jewish culture and family and fuelled by a boundless and exhilarating imaginativeness. ...Show more

Injury Time by Clive James

$19.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories

The publication of Clive James's Sentenced to Life was a major literary event. Facing the end, James looked back over his life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty to produce his finest work: poems of extraordinary power that spoke to our most elemental human emotions. Injury Time finds James in a similar mood. Keen to capture and cherish moments of beauty and love; thinking about how best to live in his remaining days; and casting his mind forward to when he will be gone and how he might be remembered. A series of intimate poems reveals family as one of life's true treasures. The poet captures tender childhood memories of his mother, has his spirits lifted by the wonderful vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic movement, and addresses the haunting loss of his father in World War Two. He writes beautifully of his early years in Australia, where he began and where he hopes to 'reach the end'. James also reflects on the wisdom and consolation to be found in art, music and literature, which have become even more precious to him in his later years.The poems in this deeply moving, inspirational and wholly unsentimental book are even more accomplished than those that came before. Injury Time shows Clive James the poet in the form of his life. ...Show more

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

$14.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories | Series: RC

"Raymond Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style." ...Show more

Here Until August by Josephine Rowe

$29.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories

A masterful collection of heartbreak, travel and seduction from an internationally acclaimed Australian author. These superbly crafted stories follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are travelling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. We meet them negotiating reluctant departu res, navigating uncertain returns or biding the disquieting calm that often precedes decisive action. An agoraphobic French emigre watches disturbing terrorist footage as she minds a dog named Chavez. A young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings-on of their neighbours than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. A Melbourne writer of real-estate listings reflects on the stifling power of shared history as she wonders what life might be like over the fence. Other stories play out in places just beyond the brink of familiarity- flooded townships and distant lakes, sunlit woodlands or paths bright with ice, places of unpredictable access and spaces scrubbed from maps. From the Catskill Mountains to New South Wales, the abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of an Australian metropolis, this scintillating collection from one of Australia's most gifted writers shows us how the places we inhabit shape us in ways both remote and intimate. Praise for Josephine Rowe 'Her gorgeous, precise language encourages inner storms.' The New York Times Book Review ...Show more

This Taste for Silence by Amanda O'Callaghan

$22.95 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories | Series: UQP Short Fiction Ser.

The balance of power in a marriage shifts, with shocking consequences. An elderly woman recounts a chilling childhood memory on the family farm. A taxi driver with a missing wife reveals unexpected skills. An inherited painting brings an eerily troubling legacy. Subtle, compelling and unsettling, Amand a O'Callaghan's stories work at the edges of the sayable, through secrets, erasures and glimpsed moments of disclosure. They shimmer with unspoken histories and characters who have a 'taste for silence'. ...Show more

Fly Already: Stories by Etgar Keret

$27.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

From a "genius" (New York Times) storyteller: a new, subversive, hilarious, heart-breaking collection. "There is sweetheartedness and wisdom and eloquence and transcendence in his stories because these virtues exist in abundance in Etgar himself... I am very happy that Etgar and his work are in the worl d, making things better." --George Saunders There's no one like Etgar Keret. His stories take place at the crossroads of the fantastical, searing, and hilarious. His characters grapple with parenthood and family, war and games, marijuana and cake, memory and love. These stories never go to the expected place, but always surprise, entertain, and move... In "Arctic Lizard," a young boy narrates a post-apocalyptic version of the world where a youth army wages an unending war, rewarded by collecting prizes. A father tries to shield his son from the inevitable in "Fly Already." In "One Gram Short," a guy just wants to get a joint to impress a girl and ends up down a rabbit hole of chaos and heartache. And in the masterpiece "Pineapple Crush," two unlikely people connect through an evening smoke down by the beach, only to have one of them imagine a much deeper relationship. The thread that weaves these pieces together is our inability to communicate, to see so little of the world around us and to understand each other even less. Yet somehow, in these pages, through Etgar's deep love for humanity and our hapless existence, a bright light shines through and our universal connection to each other sparks alive. ...Show more

The Flame (PB) by Leonard Cohen; Adam Cohen (Introduction by)

$29.99 AUD

Category: Poetry, Plays and Short Stories

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the revered poet and musician whose fans span generations and whose work is celebrated throughout the world. Featuring poems, excerpts from his private notebooks, lyrics, and hand-drawn self-portraits, The Flame offers an intim ate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist.A reckoning with a life lived deeply and passionately, with wit and panache, this collection is a valedictory work. ...Show more