Fiction

‘Tsiolkas is hardly the first to find himself lionised by the bourgeois-types he set out to affront. The adversarial or iconoclastic artist is a naturalised and often celebrated cultural figure. But Tsiolkas’ celebrity has become part of a complex dynamic that shapes the reception and interpretation of his work.’ James Ley on Christos Tsiolkas’ short fiction and a new work of criticism on the author.

‘Imperium is an allusion-filled, meta-fictional, inter-textual experiment that calls it own literary heritage into question, as if a certain kind of aesthetic experience were also one of the casualties of German history.’ Andrew McCann on Imperium, the first of Swiss author Christian Kracht’s works to appear in English.

In his fifth novel, Malcolm Knox offers a parable on marriage and identity. The Wonder Lover, Sunil Badami writes, ‘constantly forces us, suspended between disbelief and implausibility, to keep questioning our own ideas of love, family, truth, beauty – and, in a way many novels do not, narrative itself’.

A modernist novel of a colonial moment told with a postcolonial mind: ‘Thirty-five years after its first publication,’ writes Drusilla Modjeska in her introduction to a new edition of Randolph Stow’s 1979 novel, ‘Visitants remains, in my view, the finest Australian novel that takes Papua New Guinea as its inspiration and dilemma.’

In 1986 John Morrison received the Patrick White Literary Award and in 1989, the Order of Australia. Today, all his books are out of print and his name has fallen into neglect. What happened? Paul Gallimond tracks the evolution of a distinctive strain of Australian socialist realism.

Seveneves is not, it should be stressed, a conservative book. There is nothing in it comparable to, say, the long diatribes about the moral necessity for military dictatorship that lard every Robert Heinlein novel. But nor does Stephenson’s enthusiasm for science coincide with the gee-willikers liberal optimism of Golden Age science fiction.

If we consider Australian literary rankings – about as safe an occupation as handling the nation’s venomous snakes without protective gloves – then Halligan’s reputation would rest upon a pedestal not shaky, rather solid. It might not be as high as Carey, Coetzee, Astley or Garner. But it is unlikely to be overturned by some acerbic young critic intent on mischief … The Halligan brand is reputable, if not always accompanied by critical hyperventilation.

Tom McCarthy is an interesting writer. I mean this in a precise way: Sianne Ngai, in Our Aesthetic Categories defines the ‘interesting’ as an important contemporary aesthetic category that ‘has been associated with genres with an unusual investment in theory’.

Like Hall’s previous novels, The Wolf Border is set in the high, wild border country of Cumbria and is deeply informed by the physical and social textures of the region. At its centre is zoologist Rachel Caine.

Steve Toltz’s second novel Quicksand is not a radical departure from his remarkable debut A Fraction of the Whole, at least in terms of style, tone and subject matter. It features a similar range of hyper-verbal characters whose conflicts, schemes and misunderstandings build with a snowball-like momentum, smashing through into new frontiers of awfulness and hilarity.