Kevin Hart
'The poems in Young Rain have an ease and lucidity that makes them seem almost casual, so that it is with a feeling of surprise that you realise you have been drawn into a conversation of the utmost gravity concerning the private reaches of the self, as in the sequences 'Night Music' and 'Dark Retreat'. There is nothing oppressive about them though, and the limpid rigor of the intellect they embody is leavened by the tenderness and sensuality of a third sequence, 'Amo te Solo', which possesses a lustiness that would seem at home in the Bible, but has almost disappeared from contemporary poetry.' John Koethe
Born in the UK, Kevin Hart grew up in London and Brisbane, and now lives in the USA. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Flame Tree: Selected Poems (2002). He has won both the Victorian and NSW Premiers' Awards for Poetry, and the Christopher Brennan Award for a sustained contribution to Australian poetry. His published works include studies of Jacques Derrida, A.D. Hope, Samuel Johnson and Maurice Blanchot, and a translation of the poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti.
Young Rain
Kevin Hart
Giramondo Publishing
Poetry, Paperback, 96pp, $22.00
ISBN 978-1-920882-45-7
Publication November 2008
Bronwyn Lea
The Other Way Out opens with the white heat of the tropical north - with a sky so pressing it falls like glass to the ground - and closes with the carved hand of an ancient statue, proffering love and gladness and affirming life. At the heart of the book, a series of imagined monologues attempts to draw language from stone: from a Mt Warning cairn, to the sculptures of Coustou and Rodin, to monuments in Sri Lanka, China, Hollywood and beyond. Grounded in the immediacy of the physical world, these poems are at turns humorous, heated and redemptive, yet always keenly alive.
'The pace is characteristically calm, the emotion complex, the eye attentive for just the image that will illumine her reasoning without overstatement, that will catch the humour, create the tact, the fine connections of a very singular sensibility.' Alan Gould
Bronwyn Lea was born in Tasmania and grew up in Queensland and Papua New Guinea. Her first book, Flight Animals, won the Michel Wesley Wright Poetry Prize and the Anne Elder Award. In 2006 she was awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize for poems contained in this collection. She lives in Brisbane.
The Other Way Out
Bronwyn Lea
Giramondo Publishing
Poetry, Paperback, 96pp, $22.00
ISBN 978-1-920882-48-8
Publication November 2008
Catherine Rey
Translated from the French by Julie Rose
The new novel by French-Australian author Catherine Rey opens in provincial France in the 1970s, with the eighteen-year-old protagonist, dressed in borrowed platform shoes and a cape, her possessions in a plastic bag, abandoning her home and schooling, to move in with her lover Marco.
Two passions fuel her rebellion: rage at the cruelties of family life, particularly those inflicted by and on her mother; and a deep commitment to the act of writing, in the face of all obstacles and indifference.
Stepping Out is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, written with Rey's characteristic combination of indignation, frankness and humour, as much a dramatisation of the conflicts that have shaped her as a writer, as a testament for the generation that follows.
Catherine Rey was born in France, and raised by grandparents who had lived in Australia. She now lives in Sydney. Her previous novel, Ce que racontait Jones, published as The Spruiker's Tale by Giramondo in 2005, was shortlisted for both the Prix Femina and the Prix Renaudot. An earlier version of Stepping Out was published in France in 2007 as Une femme en marche.
Stepping Out
Catherine Rey
Translated from the French by Julie Rose
Giramondo Publishing
Fiction, Paperback, 240pp, $27.95
ISBN 978-1-920882-38-9
Publication October 2008
Evelyn Juers
In 1933 the author and activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950.
Born into a wealthy middle class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture; Nelly was twenty seven years younger, the adopted daughter of a fisherman, and a hostess in a Berlin bar. As far as his family was concerned, she was from the wrong side of the tracks.
Their story is crossed by others from their circle, including Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, his sister Carla, their friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth,and beyond them, the writers Egon Kisch, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf and Nettie Palmer.
In train compartments, ship's cabins and rented rooms, they called upon what was left to them — their bodies, their minds, their books — and amidst the debris of an era of self-destruction, built their own annexes to the House of Exile.
Evelyn Juers has lived in Hamburg, Sydney, London and Geneva. She has a PhD from the University of Essex on the Brontës and the practice of biography. Her essays on art and literature have appeared in a wide range of Australian and international publications.
House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann & Nelly Kroeger-Mann
Evelyn Juers
Giramondo Publishing
Biography, Paperback, 352pp, $32.95
ISBN 978-1-920882-44-0
Publication October 2008
Robert Gray
The title of Robert Gray's memoir is from a poem by Christopher Brennan, 'The land I came thro' last was dumb with night/ a limbo of defeated glory, a ghost.' There is more of glory than defeat, however, in this work of memory by a writer who is himself one of Australia's best-known poets. The unrivalled ability with imagery and the expression of emotion characteristic of Gray's poetry, also distinguish his prose, in his account of his parents' painful marriage, and his own childhood, growing up on the north coast of New South Wales. The family's resilience, and the beauty of the coastal landscape, are evoked with striking economy and awareness. Beyond, the book offers the portrait of a period, told through the characters of the 'extreme people' that have influenced Gray - including his grandparents, aunts and lovers, and artists and writers such as Patrick White, Bruce Chatwin and Les Murray. This is autobiography in a lyrical style of a kind not seen in Australian writing before.
Robert Gray has published eight collections of poetry, and won every major Australian poetry prize, as well as the Patrick White Award. His poetry has been widely studied in Australian schools and universities, and published in book form in the UK, Holland, Germany and China. He has made extensive tours of Europe and Asia, reading his work.
The Land I Came Through Last
Robert Gray
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978-1-920882-35-8
autobiography, paperback, 448 pp
includes black & white photographs throughout
Publication September 2008
$34.95
Dmetri Kakmi
Mother Land is the story of a boy's love for his homeland, and of a childhood marked by the hostility between two cultures.
Kakmi's memoir offers a vivid portrayal of Greek-Turkish life on the Aegean island of Bozcaada, in all its beauty, poverty, and ignorance. At the age of eight, Dimitri is forced to confront the political realities that spell the end for the Greeks of Anatolia. Nature and his parents' volatile marriage are his only teachers as he tries to make sense of his changing world.
As the boy struggles to reconcile the different cultures within himself, he is involved in acts of violence that erode his innocence and sense of humanity. Finally, the family flees the island. Years later, the adult Dimitri returns in the hope of making peace with his past.
Dmetri Kakmi was born in Turkey to Greek parents. His essays have been published around the globe. He compiled and edited the acclaimed children's anthology When We Were Young, and was the co-recipient of The Peter Blazey Fellowship in 2007. He lives in Melbourne, where he works as senior editor for Penguin Books.
Mother Land
Dmetri Kakmi
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978-1-920882-43-3
memoir, paperback, 288 pp
Publication July 2008
$29.95
Antigone Kefala
Written from her home in the Sydney suburb of Annandale over a period of thirty years, but ranging widely, to Broken Hill and Wilcannia, Paris, Venice, Prague and Athens, Kefala's Sydney Journals portrays the intellectual milieu of the writer and her circle, many of them emigrés, a world sustained by conversation and friendship, and by reflection, on books and paintings, plays and films, and literary fortune.
At the same time the journals record, with a poet's eye, the domestic and public life of the period, the changing seasons, the ageing of the writer and her companions, and the dramatic beauty of the city and its landscapes.
Antigone Kefala's writing is remarkable for its clarity, intensity and austerity. Intimate in its recollections, social in nature, the Journals establishes her as one of Australia's great diarists.
Antigone Kefala has written four works of fiction, including The First Journey, The Island and Summer Visit, and four poetry collections, The Alien, Thirsty Weather, European Notebook and Absence: New and Selected Poems. Born in Romania of Greek parents, she lived in Greece and New Zealand before coming to Sydney.
Sydney Journals: Reflections 1970-2000
Antigone Kefala
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978-1-920882-41-9
autobiography, paperback, 256 pp
Publication May 2008
$27.95
Michael Farrell
Michael Farrell's new collection is 'a raid on the inarticulate', but not as T.S. Eliot intended - it liberates energies which exist within language, though they may not easily be spoken, or spoken about. The poems are composed through the application of principles familiar from contemporary music - sampling and remixing, repetition and substitution, permutation and chance. This gives them a formal quality, so that one can think of them as concept-poems, songs for the page. At the same time the reader registers the pressure of feeling: wonderful lines and phrases emerge, expressions of tenderness or vulnerability. Michael Farrell's poetry gestures towards secret and codified significance while carrying an emotional intensity that will resonate with readers.
Michael Farrell's previous books are ode ode (Salt, 2002) and BREAK ME OUCH (3 Deep, 2006): the latter graphic poetry. He has edited poetry features for both Australian and U.S. journals. He has recently completed an M.A. thesis on the billycan in Australian poetry, and an Asialink project on poetry and manga in Nagoya.
'Farrell's ear is as warm as an analog synthesiser' Aaron McCollough
a raiders guide
Michael Farrell
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978-1-920882-36-5
Poetry, Paperback, 96pp
Publication April 2008
$22.00
Alan Wearne
Alan Wearne's new collection is made up of three parts, 'The Australian Popular Songbook', a suite of poems inspired by popular songs from the 1880s through to the 1980s; 'The Metropolitan Poems', a group of stories in verse inspired by suburbs of great moment, like Hurstville, Ascot Vale and Chatswood; and the poetic monologue 'Breakfast with Darky', in which a Melbourne high-school teacher looks back twenty years to a time when he was both an up-and-coming Social Realist writer and a Communist Party activist. Ever the master of the Australian vernacular, Wearne proves himself here in the shorter forms of song and story.
Alan Wearne is the author of two poetry collections, Public Relations and New Devil, New Parish; a satire on Melbourne football Kicking in Danger; and the verse novels Out Here, The Nightmarkets, and The Lovemakers, which won the NSW Premier's Prize for Poetry, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the Colin Roderick Award.
'Testament to a fierce imagination, where the visual and the aural are dovetailed into a stunning, original whole.' Anthony Lawrence
The Australian Popular Songbook
Alan Wearne
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978-1-920882-41-9
Poetry, Paperback, 96pp
Publication April 2008
$22.00
New - Giramondo Classic Reprint Series
Gerald Murnane
First published in 1974, and out of print for almost twenty years, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's first novel, and in many respects his masterpiece, an unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a Victorian country town in the late 1940s. Clement Killeaton transforms his father's obsession with gambling, his mother's piety, the cruelty of his fellow pupils and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex, into an imagined world centred on horse-racing, played in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. Out of the child's boredom and fear and fascination, Murnane's lyrical prose opens perspectives charged with yearning and illumination, offering in the process a truly original view of mid-twentieth-century Australia.
Gerald Murnane was born in a northern suburb of Melbourne in 1939. He spent part of his childhood in country districts of Victoria, moved back to the suburbs of Melbourne in 1949, and has never since left. He has published six books of fiction since Tamarisk Row - A Lifetime on Clouds, The Plains, Landscape with Landscape, Inland, Velvet Waters and Emerald Blue. His most recent book is the collection of essays Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (Giramondo, 2006). Gerald Murnane is a recipient of the Patrick White Literary Award, and in 2007 was awarded an Emeritus Fellowship by the Literature Board of the Australia Council.
Tamarisk Row
Gerald Murnane
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978-1-920882-39-6
fiction, paperback, 294 pp
Publication March 2008
$27.95
Lucy Dougan
A complex awareness of family life is at the heart of Lucy Dougan's new collection. Its narrative interweavings lead us from the world of books and romance into motherhood and its immersion in the world of children, then summon up, in turn, the poet's own childhood, and its barely recognised estrangements, 'the father that I did not know', and later a whole new family, to be reclaimed as her own. Dougan's poems are alive to the intimations which exist at 'the fugitive border of thought', and celebrate the imagination's power to mould, to recover, and to repair.
Lucy Dougan was born and grew up in Perth, where she now lives. Her first book, Memory Shell, won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2000, and was praised for the 'honesty and remarkable grace' of its personal and intelligent lyrics. White Clay won the 2006 Alec Bolton Award for an unpublished manuscript by an Australian poet.
White Clay
Lucy Dougan
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978-1-920882-32-7
Poetry, Paperback, 96pp
Publication March 2008
$22.00
Lisa Gorton
At the heart of Lisa Gorton's first collection of poems is a sequence set in the Mallee district of Victoria in the last years of World War II. A meditation on ambition, patience and waste, it explores the experience of first settlement through elegy, dramatic monologue, the portrait poem and the short lyric. Other poems are set in cities and in the future. Written in a contemporary baroque style, combining farfetched imagery with intense emotion, this is poetry that leaps out of elaboration into clear air and light.
Lisa Gorton was the inaugural winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in anthologies, newspapers and journals in Australia and the US. She is the author of Cloudland, a novel for children.
'Press Release is an exciting collection, riding high on the shock-absorbers of serious wit.' Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Press Release
Lisa Gorton
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978-1-920882-34-1
Poetry, Paperback, 72pp
Publication November 2007
$22.00
Sara Knox
The Orphan Gunner is an unconventional romance set in bomber command in Lincolnshire during the Second World War.
Evelyn and Olive grew up together in the Canabolas Valley near Orange. They are in England at the outbreak of war: Evelyn as a pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary, Olive in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. They're joined by Evelyn's brother Duncan, a novice gunner in Lancaster L-Love, flying bombing raids over Germany.
The raids take their toll on the crew, and the two women are drawn into a plot involving disguise and mistaken identity, to get the exhausted Duncan out of service.
The Orphan Gunner explores the seductions of passing, the licence granted by risk, and the selflessness - and selfishness - of sacrifice. The relationship between the two women is portrayed with subtlety and warmth, and an extraordinary sense of historical detail which brings its wartime setting vividly to life.
Sara Knox was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and now lives and writes in Australia. She is the author of Murder: a Tale of Modern American Life, and teaches cultural history and creative writing at the University of Western Sydney.
The Orphan Gunner
Sara Knox
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978 1 920882 28 0
Novel, Paperback, viii + 376pp
Publication October 2007
$29.95
Joanne Burns
Joanne Burns's strongest collection yet offers a range of styles, from condensed narratives which tilt towards film, airport novels and science fiction, to poems in prose that read like personal or reflective essays, to short elliptical verses, almost haiku, which open the details of domestic or city life to large and dramatic perspectives. Her poems are often comic: but darker tones infiltrate their private and public landscapes. The surreal quality of their imagery, and Burns's often oblique line of attack, take the reader to "a dairy at the edge of the mind" unlike any dairy with real cows one is ever likely to encounter.
Joanne Burns is a writer of poetry, prose poems, short fictions and monologues. Her most recent collection footnotes of a hammock, was joint winner of the 2005 ACT Arts Judith Wright Award. Her work has been widely published, taught in high schools, broadcast on radio and television, and performed for theatre.
an illustrated history of dairies
Joanne Burns
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978 1 920882 22 8
Poetry, Paperback, 112 pp
Publication October 2007
$22.00
Mireille Juchau
In her late twenties, Martine Hartmann moves from Sydney to New York to pursue her career as a photographer, leaving behind her mother Lotte, a holocaust survivor. Nine years later, Martine's daughter Ruby goes missing in Central Park. Ruby's disappearance throws Martine into an emotional struggle which threatens to overwhelm her, but which also, in time, brings her to understand Lotte's anxieties and inhibitions, and to discover the act of abandonment at their heart.
Burning In is a closely observed psychological novel with an extraordinary eye for detail, and an unerring instinct for the suppressed rhythms of thought and feeling. Structured around two mysteries and three generations of Jewish women, it is an extended meditation on loss and guilt, exploring the long shadows cast by the past on the present, and the relationship between parental love and the imperatives of survival.
Mireille Juchau's first novel Machines for Feeling was shortlisted for the 1999 Vogel/Australian Literary Award. In 2002 her play, White Gifts, won the Perishable Theatre International Women's Playwriting Competition and was performed and published in the US. Known also for her arts essays and reviews, Juchau has received grants from the Ian Potter Foundation, Arts NSW and the Australia Council, and is a recipient of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship.
Burning In
Mireille Juchau
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978 1 920882 27 3
Novel, Paperback, x + 310pp
Publication September 2007
$27.95
Jane Gibian
Jane Gibian is one of Australia's most promising poets, and Ardent is her first major collection. Exhibiting a range of poetic forms, including free verse, haiku, tanka and the pantoum, Gibian's poems throw a sharp focus on, and draw maximum resonance from, small or fleeting details. Many engage with foreign places, particularly Vietnam, and with the experience of negotiating different cultures and languages. Her poetry has a certain restraint, but can also be hard-hitting and ironic when least expected.
Jane Gibian is the author of two poetry books, The Body's Navigation (1998) and long shadows (2005). In 2002 she was awarded an Asialink Literature Residency in Hanoi. She works as a librarian and ESL teacher.
Ardent
Jane Gibian
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978 1 920882 26 6
Poetry, Paperback, 86 pp
Publication August 2007
$22.00
John Hughes
In Someone Else award-winning essayist John Hughes pays homage to twenty one artists, writers and musicians who have had a formative influence on his imagination. From Chekhov and Borges and Beckett, to Proust, Rothko and Cage - each essay brings its subject to life in unexpected ways. Kafka rewrites the parable of Abraham and Isaac, with no one to stay Abraham's knife. Wittgenstein considers the relationship between turtles and time. Bob Dylan stars in a fantasy of travellers and deserts and women with knives and silver earrings. Just around the corner from where Hughes works, Dostoyevsky fries kidneys in the kitchen of his Stanley Street terrace... Like The Idea of Home, Someone Else uses the essay as a form of autobiography. Here, however, the essays are fictions. Or are they? Hughes tells the stories of the figures who live in his mind by making them tell his stories - and in doing so engages in an art of literary ventriloquism.
John Hughes was born in Cessnock, in the Hunter Valley of NSW, and educated at the Universities of Newcastle and Cambridge, and the University of Technology, Sydney. His first book, The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays, won both the National Biography Award and the NSW Premier's Award for Non Fiction. He is the librarian at Sydney Grammar School.
Someone Else
John Hughes
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978 1 920882 25 9
Fiction, Paperback, xviii + 206pp
Publication July 2007
$24.95
J.S. Harry
The poems in Not Finding Wittgenstein feature Peter Henry Lepus, British-born, but of Creole origins, and moreover, a rabbit. 'Provoked into trying to use his mind', Peter Henry searches the world for philosophers, conversing with Wittgenstein in Antarctica and Bertrand Russell in Japan, and somewhat onesidedly, with 'Chairman Miaow' under moonlight. In the sequence 'Iraq, 2003', set during and after the invasion by coalition forces, he falls in with A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin, story-hunting journalists, ancestor-seekers of various species, and a camel that looks after Number One.
J.S. Harry's collections of poetry include The Life on Water and the Life Beneath, Selected Poems, which won the 1996 Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry, and Sun Shadow, Moon Shadow. 'The further Harry seems from taking horror and extremity seriously, the more the poem insists that, while language can never intercept an incoming missile, it can light up a moral scene as nothing else can. For me she is the most arresting poet working in Australia today.' Peter Porter.
Not Finding Wittgenstein
J.S. Harry
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978 1 920882 20 4
Poetry, Paperback, 238pp
Publication June 2007
$24.95
Antoni Jach
Seven conscripts from a village near Dijon set out to follow Napoleon on his campaign to conquer Egypt. Children of the Enlightenment, they are filled with wonder by all they see, and by the Great Man who is their leader. Their lives are fraught with danger, and three die. One of the band, who looks like Napoleon, acts as his double, a decoy for assassins. Yet the conscripts like nothing better than to talk, to think, to dream - their true vocation is to live in their imaginations. The Sphinx and the desert sands, the seraglios of Cairo and the waters of the Nile hold them in thrall. Later, the survivors sail with Nicholas Baudin on his expedition to New Holland. Again they are threatened, by disease and starvation, and again their sense of wonder allows them to transcend misfortune. But only one of the dreamers will survive, to tell the story of the seven from a slab hut in Rose-Hill, a short distance from the fledgling settlement of Sydney-Town.
Antoni Jach is the author of An Erratic History, a history of Australia in poetry, and two previous novels, The Weekly Card Game and The Layers of the City, which was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Award and translated into Turkish. He is an editor, publisher and lecturer in creative writing at RMIT University.
Napoleon's Double
Antoni Jach
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978 1 920882 23 5
Novel, Paperback, viii + 312pp
Publication May 2007
$29.95
Fay Zwicky
Over the past nine years, Fay Zwicky's repertoire of philosophical meditations, with autobiographical underpinning, has been modified and extended by a close engagement with contemporary political and cultural concerns. Whether dramatised in present-day terms, or brought into focus through historical parallels, the poems collected in Picnic probe the uses and abuses of power, most notably in the central sequence, 'The Terracotta Army at Xi'an', which explores modern despotism in the ancient guise of the Quin Dynasty. Austere, elegaic, occasionally satirical, playful and ironic, these poems approach mortality with few illusions, written, as the poet notes, 'against the coming dark'.
Fay Zwicky's previous collection, The Gatekeeper's Wife, won the 1998 West Australian Premier's Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's and Adelaide Festival Awards for Poetry. In 2005 she received both the Patrick White Literary Award, and the FAW Christopher Brennan Award 'for work of sustained quality and distinction'.
Picnic
Fay Zwicky
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 18 9
Poetry, Paperback, x + 79pp
Publication October 2006
$22.00
Alexis Wright
Winner of the 2007 Miles Franklin Award
Alexis Wright is one of Australia's finest Aboriginal writers. Carpentaria is her second novel, an epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, from where her people come. The novel's portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight's renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other.
Wright's storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, farce and politics. The novel teems with extraordinary characters - Elias Smith the outcast saviour, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, the queen of the rubbish-dump Angel Day and her sea-faring husband Normal Phantom, the fish-embalming king of time - figures that stride like giants across this storm-swept world.
Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her books include Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the outback town of Tennant Creek, and the novel Plains of Promise, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, the Age Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction, and translated into French as Les Plaines de l'espoir.
Carpentaria
Alexis Wright
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 17 0
Novel, Paperback, viii + 520pp
Publication August 2006
$29.95
Louis Nowra
Known primarily as a dramatist and screenwriter, Louis Nowra is also a provocative and stylish essayist, displaying the same fascination with the unpredicable aspects of human behaviour that we associate with his plays. In Chihuahuas, Women and Me his subjects range from porn star Christy Canyon to French author and statesman Chateaubriand, from the antics of the tiny chihuahua to the paranoid and surreal logic of Russian life. There are two essays devoted to writing for theatre and film; and to conclude, an account of Nowra's huge repository of stories, culled from newspapers and magazines, and pasted into his 21,000-pages of scrapbooks.
Louis Nowra is the author of many critically acclaimed plays, including Inside the Island, The Golden Age, Cosi, Radiance and most recently, The Woman with Dog's Eyes and The Marvellous Boy. His has published four novels, The Misery of Beauty, Palu, Red Nights and Abaza, two volumes of autobiography, The Twelfth of Never and Shooting the Moon, and three works of non-fiction The Cheated, Warne's World and Walkabout.
Chihuahuas, Women and Me
Louis Nowra
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 14 6
Essays, Paperback, x + 278pp
Publication November 2005
$27.95
Beverley Farmer
Ten years in the writing, The Bone House is an extended meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind, composed of three long essays, each based on a single theme, and woven out of the elemental symbols of earth, and water, fire and blood, light and darkness.
What does art know that we do not? Alongside the urge to grasp the world, to abstract and to delve, is the urge to make our visions known, to fix the moment in time in its fullness of meaning. The Bone House presents these moments in the form of a mosaic made from myth, poetry and fable, from relics of the past, from explorations and illuminations and surface impressions. Set out like a commonplace book, the essays can be read in any sequence, or savoured for their detail.
Beverley Farmer is the author of three collections of short stories, Milk, which won the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction, Home Time and Collected Stories; the writer's notebook, A Body of Water; and two novels, The Seal Woman, and The House in the Light, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.
The Bone House
Beverley Farmer
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 06 5
Essays, Paperback, xii + 332pp
Publication October 2005
$29.95
Nicholas Jose
The drama begins with a body dumped in south-western Sydney - skinned, with no face. Lewis Lin, taxi driver, photographer, recent arrival from Beijing, happens to be at the scene. With detectives Ginger Rogers and Shelley Swert in pursuit, Lin finds himself drawn into a deadly immigration racket, with a cast which includes a film-maker just in from LA, a Buddhist monk, a millionaire bachelor artist, a masseuse, a maniacal violinist, and a refugee assassin. Part thriller, part ethnic noir, dark and comic by turns, Original Face offers a sensuous and highly coloured portrait of the jostling energies that make up life in the contemporary Australian city.
Drawing its title from an ancient Zen koan, the novel traces the complicated manoeuvres by which people mask their identities, and the accidental pathways by which these hidden selves come to light.
Nicholas Jose was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1987-1990, and has written widely on contemporary Asian and Australian culture. He is the author of seven highly regarded novels, three of which, Avenue of Eternal Peace, The Rose Crossing and The Red Thread, deal with Chinese subjects.
Original Face
Nicholas Jose
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 13 1
Novel, Paperback, viii + 308pp
Publication September 2005
$27.95
Jennifer Maiden
Winner Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, Age Book of the Year Award
The centrepiece of Jennifer Maiden's new poetry collection is the sequence of "George Jeffreys" poems written in response to September 11 and the Iraq war. But Maiden's poetry ranges widely, from the international to the national to the local, offering poems which focus with equal intensity on Donald Rumsfeld or Bob Carr, the deserts of Afghanistan or the rockpools at Austinmer beach, the policies of Nato or the exhibits at the local agricultural show. The collection also includes what Maiden calls "parallel poems", poems which are personal and intimate, and offer quiet meditations on nature and her closest relationships, particularly with her daughter Katharine. In these, the noise of politics and war is shut out, and the clarity of the landscape or the gestures of recognition that pass easily between mother and daughter, point to another, friendlier kind of understanding.
Jennifer Maiden has won the N.S.W. Premier's Award for Poetry twice, the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry, the Christopher Brennan Award for a lifetime of achievement in poetry, and many other prizes. Her recent poetry book include Selected Poems (1990), Acoustic Shadow (1993) and Mines (1999).
Friendly Fire
Jennifer Maiden
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 12 X
Poetry, Paperback, 100pp
Publication September 2005
$21.95
Brian Castro
Winner 2006 Queensland Premier's Award for Fiction
Brian Castro's new novel is set in the Dandenong Ranges in the years between the Depression and the Second World War. The story revolves around Swan Hay, born Shuang He, daughter of a country schoolteacher, her marriage to the passionate and brutal Darcy Damon, and her love affair with the aviator and architect Jasper Zenlin. Fifty years after her disappearance, Norman Shih, a rare book librarian, pieces together Swan's chaotic life from clues found in guest house libraries, antiquarian bookshops and her own elusive writings. But what exactly is his relationship to her?
The Garden Book is about loneliness, addiction, exploitation; it is about the precarious nature of Australian lives, when gripped by fear and racial prejudice. Yet underlying the story, and commanding it, there is the assured beat of Castro's prose, evoking an ideal world beyond these fears, full of richness and power.
Brian Castro lives in the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne. His previous novel, Shanghai Dancing (also published by Giramondo) won both the NSW and Victorian Premier's Awards for Fiction.
The Garden Book
Brian Castro
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 10 3
Novel, Paperback, xii + 324pp
Publication August 2005
$27.95
Gerald Murnane
This collection of essays leads the reader into the curious and eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classic novel The Plains, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. Delicately argued, and finely written, they describe his dislocated youth in the suburbs of Melbourne and rural Victoria in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, his obsession with racehorses and grasslands and the Hungarian language, and above all, his dedication to the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the familiar details of Australian life.
Gerald Murnane was born in a northern suburb of Melbourne in 1939. He spent part of his childhood in country districts of Victoria, moved back to the suburbs of Melbourne in 1949, and has never since left. He is the author of seven books of fiction, including Tamarisk Row, The Plains, Inland, Landscape with Landscape and Velvet Waters.
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
Gerald Murnane
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 09 X
Essays, Paperback, x + 230pp
Publication August 2005
$24.95
Catherine Rey
Translated from the French by Andrew Riemer
In a run-down shack in a godforsaken town on the edge of the Gibson Desert an old circus family has come to rest. Tarcisius the 100 year-old father, once ringmaster of the Queen Pigmy Circus, lies dying on the verandah. The vindictive matriarch Magnolita Rosaria, famous in her youth as Soto the Flying Lady, and now so fat she cannot walk, rules their three sons. The oldest is a soldier, an arsonist and murderer, the second a hell-fire preacher, a lecher and a thief. The third has a daughter, Trinity, who inherits Magnolita Rosaria's skills as an acrobat and sets the circus world alight. Her grandmother's hatred knows no bounds...
With this baroque tale of family cruelty and revenge, bred in the circus ring, and told by a one-eyed spruiker with a parrot perched on his head, Catherine Rey appears on the Australian scene fully formed as an author, with a voice that is rich, extravagant, dark, and compelling in its intensity.
Catherine Rey lives in Perth, but The Spruiker's Tale was originally written in French and published in Paris, where it received glowing reviews, and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina and the Prix Renaudot. It has been translated into English by Andrew Riemer, author of the award-winning memoir Inside Outside, and chief book reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Read the feature on The Spruiker's Tale from the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum.
The Spruiker's Tale
Catherine Rey
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 07 3
Novel, Paperback, 262pp
Publication April 2005
$24.95
John Hughes
Winner 2005 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction
In The Idea of Home John Hughes writes about growing up in the Hunter Valley coal-mining town of Cessnock, in a household dominated by memories of the Ukraine, which his mother and grandparents were forced to flee during the Second World War. Hughes charts the effect their stories and routines had on him as a child, the way they shaped his imagination, and determined his idea of himself, as a student in Newcastle, and later as the holder of a prestigious scholarship at Cambridge University. Yet this inheritance almost undoes him, for in Cambridge what he encounters is not the romantic idea of Europe he had imagined, but a provincialism more pronounced than that he had left behind in Australia.
John Hughes was born in Cessnock, in the Hunter Valley of NSW, and educated at Cessnock High School, the Universities of Newcastle and Cambridge, and the University of Technology, Sydney, where he completed his PhD. He currently teaches English at Sydney Grammar School.
The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays
John Hughes
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 04 9
Essays, Paperback, 207pp
Publication November 2004
$24.95
edited by Thomas Wohlfahrt and Tobias Lehmkuhl
Mouth to Mouth had its origins in the Translation Workshop held at the Berlin Poesiefestival in June 2003, when ten German-speaking poets and ten Australian poets met over three days to translate each other's poems. The selection has been expanded to include the work of fifteen poets from Germany, Switzerland and Austria, Thomas Kling, Kathrin Schmidt, Peter Waterhouse, Kerstin Hensel, Ulf Stolterfoht, Joachim Sartorius, Ursula Krechel, Marcel Beyer, Ulrike Draesner, Nico Bleutge, Sabine Scho, Raphael Urweider, Sabine Naef, Uwe Kolbe and Anja Utler. The translators are Australian poets Luke Davies, Dorothy Porter, Robert Gray, Judith Beveridge, Anthony Lawrence, Gig Ryan, Antigone Kefala, Samuel Wagan Watson, Joanne Burns and Peter Skrzynecki, as well as the European poet-translators Michael Hofmann, Andrew Duncan, Richard Dove, Andrew Shields and Tony Frazer. The fact that the translators are themselves poets of distinction ensures that Mouth to Mouth can be read as a testament, both to the vitality of the poetry being written in German today, and to the art of poetic translation.
Mouth to Mouth: Contemporary German Poetry in Translation
ed. Thomas Wohlfahrt and Tobias Lehmkuhl
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 03 0
Poetry, Paperback, 272pp
Publication June 2004
$24.95
Judith Beveridge
Winner 2004 Judith Wright Calanthe Award
Winner 2004 C.J. Dennis Award for Poetry
Wolf Notes has been seven years in the writing, and follows Judith Beveridge's two earlier award-winning collections, The Domesticity of Giraffes and Accidental Grace. Beveridge's poetry is remarkable for its attentiveness to the humble rituals of life. It discovers richness and grace in the smallest, the poorest, the most awkward or most transient of beings. There is a Buddhist underpinning to this awareness of latent power, recognised in the collection's central sequence of poems, which depicts Siddhattha Gotama's wandering through the forests and towns of Northern India before he became the Buddha. Poems from this sequence were awarded the 2003 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize.
Judith Beveridge is one of Australia's best known poets. Her prizes include the NSW and Victorian Premiers' Awards for Poetry and the Mary Gilmore Award.
Judith Beveridge
Wolf Notes
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 00 6
Poetry, Paperback, 128pp
Publication December 2003
$22.00
Anthony Lawrence
Anthony Lawrence characteristically sets his poems within powerful landscapes and seascapes. There is a dramatic confrontation in them, between the elemental forces of nature, and those within the consciousness of his characters. His focus on relationships, the rhythms of work, and the presence of danger in these primal settings, gives to his moral questioning a primal quality in turn.
The Sleep of a Learning Man is the sixth collection of poems by Anthony Lawrence, who has won both the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. He has also written a novel, In the Half Light, published in Australia and the UK by Picador in 2000.
"His instincts are as true as his conscience is fierce. These evocative poems turn a breath of sea air, a shred of kelp, the brush of flesh, into a whole sensual novel." - Robert Drewe
Anthony Lawrence
The Sleep of a Learning Man
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 1 920882 01 4
Poetry, Paperback, 112pp
Publication December 2003
$22.00
Brian Castro
Winner 2004 NSW Premier's Award for Fiction and Book of the Year Award
Winner 2003 Vance Palmer Award for Fiction
"Shanghai Dancing is a fictional autobiography. Told from an Australian perspective, it is loosely based on my family's life in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau from the 1930s to the 1960s. Drawing on memory, stories, photos, and family myths and secrets, the book is about the twists and turns of fiction and personal history. I feel this tale has been lurking in the background for quite some time, finding its way out of the labyrinth through dissimulation and story-making." Brian Castro.
Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950, and arrived in Australia in 1961. His novels include Birds of Passage (1983), which shared the Australian/Vogel Literary Award; Double-Wolf (1991), winner of the Age Fiction Prize and the Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction; After China (1992), which also won the Victorian Premier's Award; and Stepper (1997), for which he received the National Book Council Banjo Award. He currently resides in the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne.
reviews & awards :: about the author :: extract
Brian Castro
Shanghai Dancing
Giramondo Publishing
Paperback, 464pp, 48 illus
ISBN 0 9578311 8 8
$29.95
Emma Lew
Winner 2003 Judith Wright Calanthe Award
Winner 2003 C.J. Dennis Award for Poetry
Emma Lew is highly regarded amongst contemporary Australian poets for the dramatic intensity of her poems, which combine sudden shifts of voice and perspective with a heightened awareness of the moment. The historical range of her settings, the sense of risk and adventure felt by her characters, and the variety of her forms - from portrait to monologue to lyrical celebration - deepen and enrich the drama in her new collection, Anything the landlord touches.
Emma Lew's first poetry collection, The Wild Reply, was the joint winner of the 1997 Age Poetry Book of the Year Award.
Anything the landlord touches
Paperback, 96pp
ISBN 0 9578311 6 1
Antigone Kefala
Summer Visit is a collection of three novellas by the distinguished Australian poet Antigone Kefala. 'Intimacy', charts the breakdown of a marriage. 'Conversations with Mother' is a portrait of grief. Between these stories of crisis, 'Summer Visit' speaks of memory and the past as a living force. All exhibit the remarkable combination of clarity, intensity and spareness, for which Kefala is renowned.
Antigone Kefala is the author of three previous books of fiction, The First Journey, The Island, and Alexia: A Tale of Two Cultures. Her most recent book of poetry is the collection Absence: New and Selected Poems.
Summer Visit: Three Novellas
Paperback, 120pp
ISBN 0 9578311 5 3