One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one cafe window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris," Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.
True crime buff Gus Green has always felt out of place in the world. He's overweight, gay, his injured mum's primary carer, and he only has two real friends: sporty Kane and feisty Shell, who are both dealing with their own problems.Gus's life is flipped on its head one day when he finds a missing persons website with a digitally aged picture of a missing boy who looks eerily like him. Could he be a kidnapping victim? It would explain a lot about his patchy background, but what would that make his mum - his kidnapper?As Gus and his friends dive into the mystery, their investigation reveals more questions than answers. Can they unravel the case before his world falls apart? And what will they do if the truth is too much to handle?
Examines the medicalisation of common human experience. Regardless of the context and cause, distress is increasingly interpreted and diagnosed as a mental illness - commonly clinical depression.
People changed; they were no longer recognisable as Australians. Frustrations and misfortunes festered into wounds here, deranged the mind and poisoned the blood.¿Suicide, or murder? Newly arrived in Papua, where even the luscious vegetation conspires with the bureaucrats to bewilder her, Stella Warwick is determined to prove her husband did not take his own life. Defying the patronising concern of officials, she ventures deep into the jungle, striding ever closer to the horrifying heart of the mystery.
Brutal is a story within a story. Former ABC journalist Paula Nagel, once a household name, has led a dramatic life.
Batman University, a struggling higher education institution on the outskirts of the city, plans an open day to impress its new President, an eminent British academic whose dubious past is catching up with him. The marketing team goes into overdrive.
"Mood is a story about love, family and self-fulfilment, while living with mental illness. It's also a candid, absorbing inquiry into the self, and the rewards of embracing who you are, in all its complexity and contradictions. Even--especially--when it's hard."--
Hali Greengard thinks she's a freak. She's a twin from Hexa, a planet where twins are always Daka together. Except for her. She is Luma.When the navigation system on her family's interplanetary cruiser goes haywire, an ordinary family holiday turns into a nightmare. They are hurtled through space with no known destination, finally dropping into orbit six days later around a small, unlisted planet in the Milky Way called Earth.The family is welcomed by two of Earth's inhabitants, who call themselves Humans but bear a striking resemblance to Lumas. Hali finds herself strangely comfortable in this unfamiliar world, where her Daka brother stands out like a sore thumb, not her. Soon they discover that space travel is banned on Earth, and they are, in fact, fugitives from the law. Things go from bad to worse when they're spotted by the nosy kids from the farm next door, who report them to their mother, the local cop.With their new friends languishing in jail and an all points alert out on the 'dangerous aliens' (as the Earth authorities have dubbed them), Hali and her family must work quickly to save Liam and Jodi. Along the way they discover that Lumas and Humans might have more in common than they thought.This fast-paced intergalactic adventure is a story of family, friendship, and discovering who you really are.
An updated, expanded edition of Remedios Varo's translated writings, including pieces never before published in any languageWith the 2018 publication of Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, Wakefield Press introduced the writings of Surrealist painter Remedios Varo into English for the first time. These texts, never published during her lifetime, present something of a missing chapter, and offer the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief and an ongoing meditation on escape in all its forms. This new, expanded volume brings together the painter's collected writings, an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances, dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, exercises in Surrealist automatic writing and prose-poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific "On Homo rodans" an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, the essay utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways "Myths" are merely "corrupted Myrtles." Also included are newly discovered writings, including three short stories, never before published in any language.Remedios Varo (1908-63) was a Surrealist painter who worked in Spain, France and Mexico. Her paintings were influenced by Old Masters such as Bosch and El Greco, as well as Jungian philosophy and occult writings. While living in Mexico she became close friends with fellow Surrealist Leonora Carrington.
The first English collection of Cros' writings: from treatises on interplanetary communication to a sardonic science of seductionAn indefinable polymath of fin de siècle Paris, Charles Cros made work that was simultaneously grounded in literature and science. The Science of Love and Other Writings brings together for the first time in English all of his literary prose. The collection includes proto-science-fiction stories; prose poems; an essay on methods of communication with other planets; and the patent application written with his brother for a (never-built) notating keyboard. The literary imagination Cros was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, "The Science of Love" depicting a young scientist's painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis. Also included are stories such as "The Newspaper of the Future" (which presents a 19th-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and "The Stone Who Died of Love."Charles Cros (1842-88) was a French writer and inventor. He is credited with submitting the earliest method for recording sound, but his idea for the "Paleophone" was obscured by Thomas Edison's patent for the phonograph less than a year later.
Nearly 100 years later, a landmark post-Symbolist poem receives its first English translationWhen published in 1928, Vulturnus represented a new direction in Léon-Paul Fargue's writing: a shift from the lyrical post-Symbolist melancholy of his early poetry to something more grandiose, dynamic and cosmic. This long prose poem weaves together philosophical dialogue, metaphysical meditation and mournful reminiscence delivered in a language that spirals into scientific terminology and Rabelaisian neologism. Jolted into a nightmare aboard a long-distance train journey, the author finds himself on a voyage that takes him from his hometown to other existences, accompanied by the fanfare of the planets and two companions--Pierre Pellegrin and Joseph Ausudre--who guide him to a terrestrial paradise in quest of a moment of eternity. This first English translation finally introduces an essential yet underrecognized 20th-century voice and includes an essay on the text by René Daumal, who declares that "Vulturnus suffocates me with its obviousness ... I see behind Fargue the great frame of Doctor Faustroll."Léon-Paul Fargue (1876-1947) was a French Symbolist poet and essayist. He was a preeminent figure of the Parisian art scene and counted Marcel Proust and Maurice Ravel among his friends. Walter Benjamin called him "the greatest living poet in France."
Josiah Symon arrived in South Australia from Scotland in 1866 just before his 20th birthday. His baggage included two boxes of books, references praising his primary school teaching and a few English pounds. In 1934 he left an estate valued in modern terms at $A 22 million.Symon acquired his wealth as the acknowledged leader of the Adelaide Bar for 30 years, by investments in shares and property in London and Australia, and through his highly regarded vineyard and winery.Knighted for contributions to the federal cause, Symon served in the House of Assembly (1881-1887) and in the Australian Senate (1901-1913) and was, briefly, both a State and a Commonwealth Attorney-General.He headed a large family, owned an estate and working farm and was also a philanthropist, a bibliophile, Shakespearean scholar, president of cultural societies and a sought-after public speaker.His contemporaries knew him as a major figure, but he is now mainly remembered, if at all, as a reactionary and a master of vituperation. To restore balance requires recognition that this largely self-made Scot, composed of many allegiances and contradictions, took principled stands which placed him ahead, alongside and behind his times.
But here's the thing, I have programmed these poems to whisperyour name (yes, yours) in the middle of the night, in the same waythat a family-sized bar of white chocolate and packets of crinkle-cutchips whisper your name from the dark of the pantry when you'retrying to reduce your carbs.In a collection where things start innocently enough with an ovarian cyst, and where the poet wakes from dreams of sex in Bunnings (in the light bulb aisle if you're wondering), these poems crash land into your soup bowl leaving your fresh white dress drenched in Campbell's cream of tomato.Ali Whitelock's poems, bold and loud and heartbreaking, run bare arsed through the shit storm of this world while playing Rachmaninoff's fifth on a piano left out in the rain. They howl and they ache, they hoot and they pine, they curl up with the sea urchins, sing to the starfish, waltz with the seahorses - they sleep with the moon.
In South Australia, the Cornish connection with the state's copper-mining communities is well-known and deservedly celebrated. So too is the influence of the South Australian Cornish in other parts of the continent, especially neighbouring Broken Hill and Victoria.But mining was only ever part of their story. They were, as this volume makes clear, much More Than Miners, their distinctive impact readily apparent in an array of 'Cornish' cultural and social activities, notably music and Methodism. Besides, not all Cornish immigrants were miners, with many Cornish men and women involved in a wide variety of other occupations, particularly farming.This important collection of essays illuminates this extraordinary diversity, adding new depth and new insights to the endlessly fascinating story of the South Australian Cornish.
In a near future where it never stops raining, a young adolescent runs wild. With only the cantankerous Gammy and a band of terrified and broken villagers for company, this story explores coming of age when society - and all its cues - has been washed away.¿¿For the few survivors, questions of identity, nature, love, and fear are explored through the eyes of a child, against a backdrop of encroaching water.
Derek Pedley abandons his 30-year journalism career on the brink of a breakdown, haunted by addiction, compulsion and obsession, and carrying the heavy baggage of a boy who found his adoption papers at 15.When an anguished letter his mother wrote almost half a century earlier arrives five years after her death, it raises more questions than it answers. The man who was born Abraham Maddison embarks on a quest to find the truth, uncovering a story of heartbreak and lies that echoes the pain of tens of thousands of mothers and children, robbed of each other by Australia's Forced Adoption era.It is also a spiritual journey, and Derek must find a way to bridge the visceral disconnection of adoption, reunion, estrangement and death to achieve peace with his mother, Joye Maddison, who was allowed to hold her newborn just once before he was taken away in Perth, in 1972.With his marriage and mental health at stake, and guided by a psychologist and other experts, Derek confronts the worst of himself, and his past, with a blend of journalistic rigour and earthy humour.Crazy Bastard is raw and harrowing, brutally honest, and beautifully vulnerable. It is one man's search for identity, for love, and for the truth.
Set in Hamburg, London, Palermo, Brest, and other ports of call in the anxious Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, Mademoisell Bambáu tells the tales of three secret agents: the melancholic adventurer and accidental spy, Captain Hartmann; his enigmatic mistress from Naples (and a double agent for the Germans), "Signorina Bambáu"; and the sinister Páere Barbanðcon, who retires from his life of espionage and murder to eke out his troubled days in an aptly named Boarding House of Usher, where shadows are as likely to strangle a man as they are to haunt him. Like all of Mac Orlan's novels, Mademoiselle Bambáu is less a novel that a barometer of societal unease, crippling melancholy, and dark humor. It is also one of the clearer examples of what the author named the social fantastic: a less romantic notion of the fantastic as it is commonly understood, translated through the lens of modernity. Instead of the eruption of the supernatural into the everyday, Mac Orlan located a new form of the fantastic in the eruption of modernity in social life, with diabolical emanations not in supernatural beings or creatures, but in such real-life human beings as Jack the Ripper, Henri Dâesirâe Landru, and Mta Hari--some of the personages whose influence makes itself known in the novel at hand. -- Provided by publisher.
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