Literature Books

George Dyugayan was a powerful Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains (east of Broome). Over the course of a life spanning much of the twentieth century, the spirit of his late father visited him in dreams and gave him the seventeen verses of the The...

Palace of Culture is a dream diary, leading the reader into a personal and surreal engagement with the bewildering complexity of contemporary popular culture. Like her previous work Red Roses, Palace is a freewheeling work drawing the reader in to...

The Beautiful Anxiety continually breaks across boundaries of the intimate and the global in an invigorating and unsettling mix of materialist and speculative writing on the interconnectedness of life amidst the environmental and cultural turmoil of the...

Xn might be the shortest poem possible between two letters, a mathematical metaphor for poetry, shorthand for a process that takes something specific and transforms it into something more intensely itself. Jenkins' second collection begins pre-big bang,...

This engaging collection charts a wild ride, from the language of the laboratory to the surprises of hetero-sex to the yearnings of the about-to-be-cannibalised. The writing is at times provocative and sensual, at others slyly meditative, but always...

This ground-breaking anthology collects poems written by Australian poets who are migrants, their children, and refugees of Asian heritage, spanning work that covers over three decades of writing. Inclusive of hitherto marginalised voices, these poems...

Terra Bravura, began as short text messages sent to David Musgrave from the desert on the way to Broken Hill. He later described their poetic form thuis:'The poems are terrific. Vox clamantis in desierto. The lines are dense and staccato, with a kind of...

Using the Rorschach inkblots as metaphors, conjuring the wondrous and the monstrous in his poems, Toby Fitch brings a new vision and shape to Australian poetry. Old modes of expression, such as the mythic, the romantic, the symbolic and the surreal, are...

Bonny Cassidy's first book, Certain Fathoms, glimmers with precisely observed moments that make a strange place of the familiar. These poems speak not only to each other but to and of other writers: Eve Langley, John Berryman, JS Harry. Cassidy knits...

In Sly Mongoose the author deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame from the point of view of an 'ordinary punter', a...

The Wing Collection presents a broad overview of the distinctive contribution Diane Fahey has made to Australian poetry over the course of thirty years. It offers extensive selections from her work on birds and insects, on the worlds of myth and story,...

Ten nights. Ten haunted locations. One terrifying adventure across Australia.From a gaol cell to a lunatic asylum to a night in a haunted hearse, The Ghost Poetry Project is one poet's attempt to find a language of guts and daring. A unique exploration...

Best of Australian Poems is an annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot and barometer of the year that was. Capturing the richness and diversity of Australian poetry across a timeframe of 1 July...

Intensely observant, gravely acute, these poems are a true achievement. In Simon West we have a poet who knows how to weight a line, how to savour a phrase. But he also proffers the nimble wit of the title poem, and of "Faute de mieux". West is a...

Concrete Tuesday contains two new sequences including the stunning Grace , which won the Josephine Ulrick Prize in 2008 and tells the story, backwards, of a man who loses his soul. In addition to these there are several new poems, some on the familiar...

Mishearing is a companion volume to Musgrave's 2016 vers libre collection Anatomy of Voice. In it, he details the compositional method of these poems as 'mishearings' of poems via Microsoft Word 2003's in-built speech recognition function. The...

A still moment captured by a camera's shutter. The rapid fire of the mouse in a tight League of Legends match. The protracted sound of a door closing with finality.In the eighteenth edition of this creative anthology, twenty-six writers explore...

**2021 National Biography Award, highly commended****2020 NSW Premier's History Awards, shortlisted**A new edition of this acclaimed biography of an unsung literary talent.Australian poet and journalist Zora Cross caused a sensation in 1917 with...

The Supplement to the Bibliography of Australian Literature (BAL) completes the most comprehensive reference to Australian creative writing ever published. The four volumes of BAL recorded details of all separately published creative literature by...

The essays in this volume address one of the central issues in literary translation, namely the relationship between the creative freedom enjoyed by the translator and the multiplicity of constraints to which translation is necessarily subject. The links...

Benefiting from recently catalogued archival materials, The Flip Side: Old China Hands and the American Popular Imagination, 19351985 evaluates the influence of an ensemble of well-known Americans born and bred in China Pearl S. Buck, Henry R. Luce, Owen...

Time, Tide and History: Essays on the Writing of Eleanor Dark is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark's fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark's writing...

This is the first collection in print of the letters of Australian colonial poet Charles Harpur (181368) and his circle. Supported by extensive annotation newly prepared for this edition, the 200 letters and life-documents open up successive phases of...

War is traditionally considered a male experience. By extension, the genre of war literature is a male-dominated field, and the tale of the battlefield remains the privileged (and only canonised) war story.In Australia, although women have written...

The Enchantment of English is a study of the teaching of English in Australian universities, from its beginnings in the second half of the 19th century through to the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which universities proliferated and diversified. Written...

The Moods of Ginger Mick is a collection of poems about Ginger Mick, the larrikin hero of Gallipoli. On its release it was described by the Bulletin as'finely patriotic' and 'uniquely Australian'. It articulates the Anzac legend through the verses about...

Doreen, the third C.J. Dennis publication using his "Sentimental Bloke" characters, was first published by in October 1917 by Angus and Robertson.The four tales in verse in Doreen describe the married life of "the Bloke", dramatising...

Gail Jones is one of Australia's foremost contemporary novelists. Her books have won or been shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Miles Franklin Award, the Stella Prize, and numerous state literary awards. They are taught in high...

Since its publication in 1903, Joseph Furphy's Such is Life has become established as an Australian classic. But which version of the novel is the authoritative text, and what does its history reveal about Australian cultural life?From Furphy's...

One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting.In Patrick White's Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new...

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880) arrived in Sydney in 1838 and became almost immediately notorious for her poem The Aboriginal Mother, written in response to the infamous Myall Creek massacre. She published more poetry in colonial newspapers during her...

RichardFlanagan: Critical Essays is the first book to be published about thelife and work of this major world author. Written by twelve leading criticsfrom Australia, Europe and North America, these richly varied essays offer newways of understanding...

Macbeth is often read in a singular fashion: either as a cautionarymorality tale warning against ambition, or as a psychological studyof evil. In Ambivalent Macbeth, renowned Shakespeare scholar R.S.White argues that these differing readings result from...

The Romantic period is the most appealing but also the most confusing period of English literature for the student. Crucially, this book distinguishes between 'the Romantic' as modern critics use the term and 'the romantic' as it was used during the...

Over the course of the 19th century a remarkable array of types appeared in Australian literature: the swagman, the larrikin, the colonial detective, the bushranger, the "currency lass", the squatter, and more. Some had a powerful influence on the...

Christina Stead set five of her novels in the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with uncanny sharpness. Yet her relationship with place and nation remains difficult to pin down: she resisted the label 'expatriate' and her books defy...

A wave of life stories and autobiographical narratives by Aboriginal women began in the late 1970s and gained momentum a decade later with the publication of Sally Morgan's My Place (1987), which became a bestseller. While some of the books of the first...

John Shaw Neilson (18721942) is Australia's great lyric poet and Collected Poems (1934), dedicated to Louise Dyer, bears his imprimatur. Encouraged by his editor, Robert Croll, Neilson was totally involved in its publication and promotion, selecting the...

Biography of a Book traces the life of an iconic Australian literary work in the lead-up to, and for a century after, its initial publication: Henry Lawson's 1896 collection While the Billy Boils. Paul Eggert follows Lawson's gradual development of a...

We are living in the moment of the essay. The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in essays that interrogate personal experience; contemporary Australian writers are using their lives to think through the ways we connect, remember, and live,...

Lyrical and narrative-driven, with playful and fantastical elements woven throughout, the poems in The Infant Vine reflect on how ordinary moments become charged with significance and strangeness when disaster strikes. Such moments make imaginary worlds...

They follow flight paths and habitats of birds, from the Victorian Mallee to the forests of South East Asia, to Japan and the South of France. 'Sometimes,' as the painter says, 'it's almost as if I am looking at the earth with a bird's eye view- the...

Harsh Hakea is John Kinsella's second volume of collected works dating from 2005 to 2014 capturing a career in media res. It includes poems from widely read volumes like Jam Tree Gully, which won the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, and...

This is the first volume of a three-volume Collected Poems by John Kinsella that dates back to when he was seventeen, and moves on through forty-one-plus years of writing and memorising poetry. Collected in one place for the first time are poems that...

A startlingly frank take on modern femininity, Michele Seminara's Suburban Fantasy combines finely crafted narratives with lyrical artistry and sure-footed eloquence. This is raw, fiery, firebrand feminist writing that manages to artfully co-exist with...

At the Bottom of It, PainCallie tries to give the fish a good death,short and sharp, severing the brain stem.Pithing like the sound a cherry makeswhen you extract the pip. Some thingsare instinct like spitting outwhat cracks, hard, against your teeth,or...