Writing and Society Home
Publications
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)
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
Katharine Pollock, Her Fidelity, Penguin, 2022
A very funny confessional novel set in one of the only Australian independent record stores still functioning, if barely. This is High Fidelity with a female gaze.
Kathy has worked at beloved Brisbane indie record store Dusty's Records for half her life. She arrived as a teenager high on her dad’s supply of Led Zeppelin, stayed through her twenties and suddenly thirty is on the horizon and she’s still there, measuring her self-worth by her knowledge of the Velvet Underground’s back catalogue. Lately, though, cracks have been appearing in Kathy’s comfortable indie bubble.
Her Fidelity is a feminist coming-of-age story for anyone who has ever felt that a song understood them more than their own family, for anyone who has ever felt like the culture they love might not love them back, and for anyone who has ever turned to Stevie Nicks for advice while ignoring the sensible people around them.
George Haddad, Losing Face, UQP, 2022
Joey is young, indifferent. He’s drifting around Western Sydney unaware that his passivity is leading him astray. And then one day he is involved in a violent crime, one that threatens to upend his life entirely.
Elaine, his grandmother, is a proud Lebanese woman with problems of her own. When Joey is arrested, she is desperate to save face and hold herself together. In her family, history repeats itself, vices come and go, and uncovering long-buried secrets isn’t always cathartic.
This gripping and hard-hitting novel reveals the richness and complexity of contemporary Australian life and tests the idea that facing consequences will make us better people.
Emily Stewart, running time, Vagabond, 2022
Winner of the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award
A fine-tuned book-length assemblage of dispersed ‘cerebral offcuts’, virtuosically inventing ‘the shape of a mood’. Nimble and light, precise and seemingly casual: ‘following some line’ of ‘live consciousness’, ‘inner in outer’, ‘what’s around’. Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax. Condensed, sharp pops of resonant fragments create their own fresh textures and juxtapositions.
Jazz Money, how to make a basket, UQP, 2021
Winner of the 2020 David Unaipon Award
Simmering with protest and boundless love, Jazz Money’s David Unaipon Award-winning collection, how to make a basket, examines the tensions of living in the Australian colony today. By turns scathing, funny and lyrical, Money uses her poetry as an extension of protest against the violence of the colonial state, and as a celebration of Blak and queer love. Deeply personal and fiercely political, these poems attempt to remember, reimagine and re-voice history.
Writing in both Wiradjuri and English language, Money explores how places and bodies hold memories, and the ways our ancestors walk with us, speak through us and wait for us.
»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).
