Publications

Publications Book Cover 2013 Writing and Society Research Centre members and postgraduate students are actively engaged with both literary and academic publishing. We are also behind a number of important publishing initiatives.

The Sydney Review of Books

Sparked by concerns about the dwindling space for literary criticism in Australian media, the Sydney Review of Books (opens in a new window) is an online review site focusing on Australian writers and writing.

Giramondo

The Writing and Society Research Centre houses the prestigious Giramondo book imprint (opens in a new window) which publishes some of the most significant contemporary Australian authors.

Recent Staff Publications

Anthony Uhlmann, Saint Antony in his Desert, published by UWA Publishing, 2018

A defrocked priest, Antony Elm, has made his way into a desert outside Alice Springs, where he intends to stay for forty days and forty nights. He is undergoing a crisis of faith and has brought with him the typescript for a book he has failed to finish about a meeting between Albert Einstein and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. This story concerns a crisis of understanding, as Bergson confronts Einstein about the meaning of time. On the back of his typescript Antony writes another story, somehow close to his heart, which concerns two young men traveling to Sydney from Canberra for the first time in the early 1980s. »Read More (opens in a new window)

Gail Jones, The Death of Noah Glass, published by Text Publishing, 2018

The art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his Sydney apartment block. His adult children, Martin and Evie, must come to terms with the shock of their father’s death. But a sculpture has gone missing from a museum in Palermo, and Noah is a suspect. The police are investigating.
None of it makes any sense. Martin sets off to Palermo in search of answers about his father’s activities... »Read More (opens in a new window)

Alexis Wright, Tracker, published by Giramondo, 2017

Alexis Wright returns to non-fiction in her new book, a collective memoir of the charismatic Aboriginal leader, political thinker and entrepreneur Tracker Tilmouth, who died in Darwin in 2015 at the age of 62.Taken from his family as a child and brought up in a mission on Croker Island, Tracker Tilmouth worked tirelessly for Aboriginal self-determination, creating opportunities for land use and economic development in his many roles, including Director of the Central Land Council of the Northern Territory. Tracker was a visionary, a strategist and a projector of ideas, renowned for his irreverent humour and his determination to tell things the way he saw them. The book is as much a testament to the powerful role played by storytelling in contemporary Aboriginal life as it is to the legacy of an extraordinary man. »Read More

Ben Etherington, Literary Primitivism, Published by Stanford University Press, 2017

This book fundamentally rethinks a pervasive and controversial concept in literary criticism and the history of ideas. Primitivism has long been accepted as a transhistorical tendency of the "civilized" to idealize that primitive condition against which they define themselves. In the modern era, this has been a matter of the "West" projecting its primitivist fantasies onto non-Western "others." Arguing instead that primitivism was an aesthetic mode produced in reaction to the apotheosis of European imperialism »Read More (opens in a new window)

Monkey Trouble by Chris Peterson

Christopher Peterson, Monkey Trouble: The Scandal of Posthumanism, published by Fordham University Press, 2017

According to scholars of the nonhuman turn, the scandal of theory lies in its failure to decenter the human. The real scandal, however, is that we keep trying. The displacement of the human is essential and urgent, yet given the humanist presumption that animals lack a number of allegedly unique human capacities, such as language, reason, and awareness of mortality, we ought to remain cautious about laying claim to any power to eradicate anthropocentrism altogether. Such a power risks becoming yet another self-accredited capacity thanks to which the human reaffirms its sovereignty through its supposed erasure. »Read More (opens in a new window)

»More staff publications

Recent Postgraduate Publications

Fiona Wright, The World Was Whole, Giramondo, 2018

Our bodies and homes are our shelters, each one intimately a part of the other. But what about those who feel anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled within these havens? In The World Was Whole, Fiona Wright examines how we inhabit and remember the familiar spaces of our homes and suburbs, as we move through them and away from them into the wider world, devoting ourselves to the routines and rituals that make up our lives. These affectingly personal essays consider how all-consuming the engagement with the ordinary can be, and how even small encounters and interactions can illuminate our lives.

Many of the essays are set in the inner and south-western suburbs of a major Australian city in the midst of rapid change. Others travel to the volcanic coastline of Iceland, the mega-city of Shanghai, the rugged Surf Coast of southern Victoria. The essays are poetic and observant, and often funny, animated by curiosity and candour. Beneath them all lies the experience of chronic illness and its treatment, and the consideration of how this can reshape and reorder our assumptions about the world and our place within it. Read more (opens in a new window)

Luke Carman, Intimate Antipathies, Giramondo, 2019

Intimate Antipathies is the much anticipated new book by Luke Carman, the award-winning author of the cult classic An Elegant Young Man. The essays in this collection follow the writer in his oscillations through anxiety, outrage and ecstasy, and in the process explore the connections between writing and dreaming, writing and mental illness, writing and the complications of family life.

From his famous jeremiad against arts administrators in ‘Getting Square in a Jerking Circle’, through the psychotic attack brought on by the collapse of his marriage, to his surreal account of meeting with Gerald Murnane at a golf club in the remote Victorian village of Goroke, Carman explores the particular challenges faced by writers who grow up in the contested borderlands of the suburbs – always returning to his great obsession, the home on a small mountain in Sydney’s west, where his antipathies with the real world first began to shape his imagination. Read more (opens in a new window)

Samantha Trayhurn (founder), Pink Cover Zine

Pink Cover Zine is a collection of poetry, fiction and art exploring the sentimental, sensitive, nostalgic, erotic, sensual, sad, joyful and in between moments in life. i.e. The stuff that publishers have traditionally published with a pink cover. We know pink covers often come with a set of predefined literary judgements. But, we are reclaiming and celebrating the pink cover to provide more publishing avenues to diverse voices. Read more (opens in a new window)

Natalie Conyer, Present Tense, Clan Destine Press, 2019

Present Tense is a riveting hard-boiled police procedural set in modern South Africa. Veteran cop Schalk Lourens is trying to put the past behind him. But when his old boss, retired police chief Piet Pieterse, is murdered Schalk finds history has a way of infecting everything. Meanwhile, it’s also an election year. People are pinning their hopes on charismatic ANC candidate Gideon Radebe but there’s opposition and in this volatile country, unrest is never far from the surface. Schalk must tread a difficult path between the new regime and the old, between the personal and the professional, between justice and revenge. Read more (opens in a new window)

Carly Cappielli, Listurbia, Seizure, 2019

5 things you need to know about this book 1. It is written in lists 2. Set in Western Sydney 3. Features a dysfunctional narrator 4. Who is fixated on stories of missing children 5. Though she’s not entirely sure why As her world falls apart, will she be able to put the pieces together? Carly Cappielli’s Listurbia is the joint winner of the 2019 Seizure Viva la Novella VII Prize. Read more (opens in a new window)

Joshua Mostafa, Offshore, Seizure, 2019

In very near future Sydney, an academic finds himself unprepared to deal with a city collapsing into chaos. The internet has disappeared, the water isn’t running and there is no electricity. As rival paramilitary groups battle for control of the streets, he pays people smugglers to help him escape overseas, only to be held in an island detention camp. There he finds a former ally and together they try to change their fate. Offshore considers what it means to be at the mercy of a heartless and uncompromising system. Mostafa’s wry irony and visceral descriptions make for a provocative and memorable novella. Read more (opens in a new window)

»More Postgraduate Publications

Future Directions in Publishing

A key area of interest for Writing and Society going forward is digital publishing in its various forms and the ongoing changes in the ways writing is now disseminated. This is reflected in the publishing strategies adopted by Writing and Society. The Sydney Review of Books is an online review site with ever expanding readership, soundsRite already offers cutting edge digital publication.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the following organisations for their funding and support: the Literature Board of the Australia Council (Giramondo, The Sydney Review of Books), Arts NSW (The Sydney Review of Books, Western Sydney Writing Project) and The Copyright Agency (The Sydney Review of Books).

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