Spineless Wonders 2014 Catalogue

Catalogue

20.

Fourteen short australian stories

SpinelessWonders

Print | Digital | Audio

General Enquiries bronwyn@shortaustralianstories.com.au Trade orders Dennis Jones & Associates Unit 1/10 Melrich Road Bayswater, Victoria 3153, Australia T: 61 (0)3 9762 9100 F: 61 (0)3 9762 9200 theoffice@dennisjones.com.au www.dennisjones.com.au www.shortaustralianstories.com.au www.shortaustralianstories.com.au/blog/ @SpinelessWonder

Spineless Wonders Short Australian Stories

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Mary Manning

Damaged in Transit

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‘ the specs Publication Date: October, 2012 Paperback: 150 pages.

Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $22.99 ISBN: 9780987254603 Book Design by Paden Hunter Available In:

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Mary Manning takes her stories to places few writers would dare to go.

She ranges across different styles with ease in a unique voice that is tart, tight and compulsively readable.

—Paddy O’Reilly the book

This exciting debut collection of short stories includes a Goth clutching a homemade tart on a Melbourne tram, an old lady camping out on a median strip and a wife who follows her trainspotting husband into his dreams. In Manning's fractured future worlds, sexual partners are purchased and returned like commodities, and language, culture and religion are all dealt a body blow. Expertly crafted and highly imaginative, the stories explore alienation, criminal behaviour and love. There are also themes of longing in these stories, for connection and understanding in a world where relationships and people are variously damaged.

the author Mary Manning is a writer of short stories, poetry and educational books. Her stories have been awarded in the Victorian Fellowship of Writers and published in Eureka Street, Slippery When Wet and Gathering Force. Her poetry has been published in Small City Tales of Strangeness and Beauty and awarded in the Reason-Brisbane Poetry Competition and by the Melbourne Poets’ Union. She has taught primary and secondary schools, workshops, the Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing, and online classes.

Review by Jennifer Mills There are writers who look outward, observing the world around them, chroniclers of their times. Then there are those who look inward, exploring their own mind, often drawing on the subconscious. Damaged in Transit, with its interplay of public and intimate realms, is a collection that seeks to do both.

As if her own voice was barely audible over the traffic, Manning has restrained herself to easy, conversational prose in most of these short pieces, giving an illusion of simplicity and a suggestion of intimacy. With a few exceptions, notably the creepy stalker tale The Painter, most of these stories are in first person and Manning’s characters tend to be ingénues. The prose may be unassuming, but the interplay of banal problems with questions more absurd and surreal hints at a hidden depth. overland.org.au Illustrated by Paden Hunter

One advantage that short stories have is their ability to undermine their own illusion. A short story can switch its logic very quickly, pull the rug out from under a reader’s feet. While many of her characters inhabit a version of Australian suburbia, and seem focused on interpersonal conflicts played out in ordinary places, there is almost always something strange going on, a not-quite-hereness that upends the real. It’s Manning’s weirder stories that more fully exploit the potential of the form and of her style.

In many of her stories, hints of the sacred are concealed within the tale like a nut, but trapped within the shell of each bumbling individual, not quite ready to break through.

This often has upsetting consequences. Baby Shower has strong overtones of Elizabeth Jolley, that master of repressed impulses: Manning’s woman misbehaving wreaks hilarious havoc on social propriety, her laughter small redemption for an unhappy life. Other influences are more explicitly honoured, for example in a story called Reading Murakami, which features cats and airports – a story which doesn’t quite work, but pays its dues in terms of evoking the popular flat-affect mystic.

Manning chases a dream logic throughout, and readers of this collection are compelled to follow.

It is sometimes impossible to tell if her characters are telling you fibs, like Amazon Man, who might have swum the length of that river, or could simply be trapped in exotic delusions...

For all her missteps and loose ends, Manning’s odd, off-kilter world is strangely addictive and her images will leave an impression precisely because they refuse definition.

Pierz Newton-John

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Fault Lines

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Publication Date: February, 2012 Paperback: 182 pages Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $22.99 ISBN: 9780987089762 Book Design by Paden Hunter Available In:

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What does it take to make a man?

The short stories of Pierz Newton-John moves through the full range of masculine experience with an openness, not afraid to show men at their most lonely, sexual, loving, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes abusive. It reveals tender moments between father and son, first sexual experiences and what men feel and think about women.

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Fault Lines returns the grit to the Australian literary landscape.

—Matthew Condon

A startling collection … sly humour and memorable characters.

—Chris Womersley the author

Pierz Newton-John lives in Melbourne. In addition to being a writer, he is a guitarist, web developer, former psychotherapist and father. His stories have appeared in Australian literary journals and anthologies, including Meanjin, Overland, New Australian Stories, Kill Your Darlings and The Sleepers Almanac. He won the Alan Marshall Award in 2008. pierznj.blogspot.com.au

Illustration by Paden Hunter

transition might well have come straight from the couch. Newton-John seems particularly occupied with the question of what it means to be male. There are stories here about men on the make, men suffering the disappointment of broken dreams, men passionately loving their children, small boys being cruel to other small boys, teenage boys and violence, teenage boys and sex, teenage boys and love. There is tenderness, there is humour and there is barely contained rage. There is a lot of self-medication.

The quiet terror of a girl-woman being so far in over her head is perfectly, heartbreakingly captured. Elsewhere is the crushing banality of suburban life, students going off the rails, teenagers alienated from their families, relationships going wrong. Only one story is a surprise in this landscape of Australian suburban stories: Comrade Vasilii Goes to War encapsulates the absurd futility of war on the border between the fictional Ozakhstan and Uzekhstan, and the soldiers who command the outposts there.

As with the best short stories, indelible images are left on the brain: a teenage boy, convinced he his dying from melanoma, falls crying to the bathroom floor in the arms of a girl he barely knows; two Jewish boys and a Alsatian defend themselves against a racial attack; a little boy who loves birds is forced to kill a baby magpie; a father takes his young son on a holiday to break the news of divorce.

Newton-John treads along these fault lines like a guide, showing us the points where one may fall through the cracks. He does so with a professional listener's ear for dialogue and with a big heart. If It comes as no surprise to learn that Melbourne writer Pierz nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors in suburbia, then Newton-John, author of the appropriately titled Fault Lines, a in this collection of stories Newton-John unflinchingly throws the debut collection of short stories, was once a psychotherapist. As doors open. The scenes he finds and describes are not always pretty, but they are startlingly illuminated by a promising new talent in an observer of the human condition he is compassionate, curious and insightful: these beautifully written stories about lives in trauma and Australian literature.

Review by Lucy Clark

Jane Skelton

Lives of the Dead the specs Publication Date: February, 2013 Paperback: 150 pages Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $22.99 ISBN: 9780987254689

the book In this short story collection, travellers on highways and trains are preoccupied with the lives of the dead: with lost children or parents. A woman searches a suburban deadland for her missing mother. A rural family struggles on a land that fails to sustain them. A young man’s attempt to leave the strictures of family life ends in violence. Jane Skelton writes cool prose about hot landscapes, about characters seeking relief from strong emotions, characters whose lives are tied up with the Australian landscape.

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Jane Skelton shows a fine literary talent. —Helen Barnes-Bulley, literary program manager, varuna

the author Jane Skelton has published short fiction in a range of literary journals and anthologies over the past twenty years. Her novel, earth eaters, won a 2010 LitLink Unpublished Manuscript award. In 2006, she was the recipient of a Literature Board grant. She has since completed another novel entitled 1983. Jane works in the non-government community sector in Western Sydney and lives in the Blue Mountains, NSW. janeskelton.com.au

‘Jane Skelton’s earth eaters is an outstanding piece of writing. A naturalistic portrayal of country life in a tough environment.

Sex, birth, death, sickness, violence, sexual molestation, eccentricity, strangeness, all handled with clarity and compassion.

The language and description have the precision of poetry – concrete, visceral, one could say earthy.’

̶Barbara Brooks,

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‘Jane Skelton’s command of tone and language is excellent. The effect of striking metaphors and vivid metaphors in the midst of the generally quite Flat, straightforward prose, is like the effect of the dead, dry landscape, which is nevertheless alive with its own meanings; and the house, which is animate with its secret history.’

—̶delys Bird,

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‘An intelligent, engagingly written and thought-provoking work...absorbing.’

Photograph by Michelle Garrett

——̶​̶Dr Bronwen Levy,

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‘... a talent to watch.’

—̶Walter Mason,

the universal heart book club

Julie Chevalier

Permission to Lie

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the specs Publication Date: April, 2011 Paperback: 160 pages Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $22.99 ISBN: 9780978089700 Book Design by Paden Hunter

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Throughout this collection of diverse short stories, beneath her quirky humour and snappy style, Chevalier brings insight and empathy to her depiction of contemporary Australian life. One woman’s holiday flight is intruded upon by an unaccomplished child.

Another is left to care for her dead husband’s elderly father. How far will a wealthy, manipulative couple go to compensate for a childless marriage? Who can be trusted in the prison world? Whether in McCarthy’s America or in contemporary Sydney, Chevalier’s characters are drawn with honesty, humour and compassion.

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A new voice in Australian fiction, wry, gritty, knowing and true.

—Fiona McGregor, indelible ink

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the author Julie Chevalier has worked as a prison educator, home school liaison officer, librarian and waitress. Her award-winning short fiction has appeared in Antipodes, Southerly, and had been broadcast on ABC Radio. In 2011, one of her gaol stories from Permission to Lie, That Awful Brew, was included in Best Australian Stories. She currently lives in Sydney where she is an artist, poet and writer. juliechevalier.net

Illustration by Paden Hunter

The incidents that serve as catalysts for the stories in Julie Chevalier’s debut collection Permission to Lie are steeped in unflinching realism rather than fable, but are nonetheless compelling and complex in equal measure. A young writer living as a developer’s mistress in the opening story accuses the narrator of the second story, a forty-something executive who uses her vocational counselling diary to chronicle the real and imaginary lives of her fellow bus passengers, of stealing ‘her’ characters. Seven of the stories are loosely gathered around themes of imprisonment and freedom, beginning with a boy’s home on the NSW central coast, and ending with one foot on the road to re-addiction for a newly released inmate of Sydney’s Long Bay Gaol. In between, through shifting narrators, perspectives and prose styles, we meet Kynon, a recent graduate from boys’ home to adult prison, Wanda the prison psychologist, Cathie the education officer and Gav the inmate clerk. These stories, and Chevalier’s detailed portraits of her cast of wary yet surprisingly open characters, highlight the ways in which relationships of power and vulnerability operate in a state of flux, and how suddenly we can become needful – of shelter, of privacy, of understanding, of real human connections. When this switch is flicked, Chevalier’s characters, just like the rest of us, occasionally need permission to lie, to themselves and to others.

I look forward to meeting whichever characters Chevalier might next introduce me to. ̶ Josh Mei-Ling Dubrau, weekend australian review

‘This collection details the yearning, the loneliness and the small hopes of our modern lives.’

̶ ̶ Mark Rossiter, faculty of arts and social sciences, uts

A.S. PatriC

The Rattler & Stories

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the specs Publication Date: October, 2011 Paperback: 160 pages Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $22.99 ISBN: 9780987089724 Book Design by Miles Allinson

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This entertaining collection includes a romp of a novella called The Rattler, as well as short stories and microfiction all set in and around contemporary Melbourne. The book includes narrative experiments, such as BOMBS – an oblique look at terrorism – to more playful pieces like Ducks, which imagines Anais Nin and June Miller living in Elwood.

Sometimes serious, sometimes seriously playful – always written in breathtakingly beautiful prose – these stories uncover the heartbreaking tragedies, slow-burning emotions and the serendipity of ordinary life.

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Spare and taut, sometimes tricky, sometimes shocking, yet always deeply and satisfyingly tender. A great collection.

—Paddy O’Reilly

the author Alec Patrić is a St Kilda bookseller and writer, whose short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals. He co-edits Verity La, described as ‘the increasingly influential online literary journal’ by SMH critic, Kerryn Goldsworthy. In 2011, he won the Ned Kelly’s SD Harvey Award for his crime story, Las Vegas for Vegans. He has also won the Booranga Prize for Short Fiction. aspatricink.blogspot.com.au

Alec Patrić, co-editor of the increasingly influential online literary journal, Verity La, is a St Kilda writer and bookseller and his home city of Melbourne features strongly in his collection, especially in the title story. The Rattler is about a rogue tram driver who wants to be a writer.

In these stories, Patrić specialises in taking the familiar and making it strange, often through the eyes of a character who is somehow alienated.

The stories are not exactly metafiction, nor are they magic realism; but they have qualities of both. The characters are the wives and husbands, the drifters and workers, the lovers and immigrants and children of Melbourne that John Morrison and other social realists wrote about so movingly and Patrić retains the tenderness and empathy of that era in stories with a sharp contemporary edge of uncertainty and strangeness. ̶ Kerryn Goldsworthy, sydney morning herald

Illustration by Miles Allinson

‘Enough gems among the 17 stories to impress any shortfiction enthusiast seeking a fresh and vibrant new voice.’ ̶ ̶ David Cohen, writer & bookseller

Vivienne Plumb

The Glove Box the specs Publication Date: February, 2014 Paperback: 158 pages Size: 203 X 133mm RRP: $24.99 ISBN: 9781925052008 Available In:

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Vivienne Plumb is an astute writer who captures Australian culture and landscape with poignant details. Her wry humour is great fun to read and this collection of short stories is both hilarious and heart-breaking.

—Shady Cosgrove, she played elvis the book In this collection, Vivienne Plumb is interested in women who are the road. In the title story, Glove Box, an otherwise house-bound and straight-laced mother regularly takes off in the family’s old Jag for hours on end. Other characters hitchhike, crisscrossing the Australian continent, accepting lifts in trucks, cars and kombi vans with trees painted on them. They are running away from dysfunctional families; they are seeking adventure or just looking for work. There are women in transit and in transition, stepping out of the traditional role ascribed to them and onto an open road. Plumb’s writing is wonderfully evocative, filled with luscious descriptions.

the author Vivienne Plumb is a playwright, poet and fiction writer. Her plays have been performed internationally. Plumb’s first novel, Secret City, was published in 2003 (Cape Catley Press). Her poetry collections Nefarious: poems and parables (2004), Crumple (2010) and The Cheese and Onion Sandwich & Other New Zealand Icons (2011) are published

by Seraph Press. She holds a Doctorate in Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong.

Mark O’Flynn

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White Light

Mark O’Flynn’s short stories, articles, reviews and poems have appeared in a range of journals and magazines both here and overseas, including Australian Book Review, The Bulletin, The Good Weekend, Heat, Westerly, Meanjin, Southerly, Island, Overland, New Australian Stories (Scribe) and Best Australian Stories (Black Inc). O’Flynn’s lastest novel, The Forgotten World (2013), is published by Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, Australia.

Paperback: 150 pages Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $22.99 ISBN: 9780987447975 Book Design by Bettina Kaiser Available In:

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Publication Date: July, 2013

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In White Light, a single mother seeks refuge in a religious cult, a young girl hijacks road machinery as her family sleeps and a marriage feels threatened by the arrival of a well-travelled ex-lover. His characters delight, his language never ceases to surprise. An accomplished poet and playwright, O’Flynn turns his hand to linked short stories, microfiction and monologues. With the skill of a ventriloquist, he conjures Shakespeare’s lago, an illiterate inmate, Banjo and a famous Australian poet stuck on a transcontinental train. The result is a heady and highly entertaining mix of wordplay, philosophical ruminations and astute social observation.

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O’Flynn’s faultless ear for laconic Aussie parlance, his wry ability to turn a story in a moment from comedy to tragedy and back again … all this makes him one of a kind, in my opinion.

—Cate Kennedy

Edited by Bronwyn Mehan

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Escape

the specs Publication Date: December, 2011 Paperback: 294 pages Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $27.99 ISBN: 9780978089748 Book Design by Paden Hunter

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Escape has unexpected tales of contemporary life, comedy, tragedy, mystery, romance, sci-fi, dystopian fantasy, a homage to David Foster Wallace and lots more. All served with a good dose of quirky and a fine turn of phrase. If you like your genres with a bit of edge, you’ll love this diverse collection of stories. Featuring award-winning writers Ryan O’Neill, Jen Mills, Andy Kissane, Louise Swinn, Julie Chevalier, A.S. Patrić and Kim Westwood, as well as stories chosen by Sophie Cunningham as part of the inaugural Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award.

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Quality short fiction, packed with surprises. Prepare to be transported.

—Marion Halligan

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the editor Bronwyn Mehan runs Spineless Wonders, publishing quality short Australian stories in print, digital and audio formats. Bronwyn’s short fiction has appeared in literary journals and she won third prize in the 2009 Age Short Story competition. She recently returned to Sydney after almost five years in Darwin where she was a freelance editor, writing teacher and NT Writers Centre Board member. Bronwyn co-edited Bruno’s Song & other stories with Sandra Thibodeaux. bronwynmehan.wordpress.com

Edited by Angela Meyer

The Great Unknown

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Publication Date: July, 2013 Paperback: 250 pages.

Size: 203 X 133mm RRP: $27.99 ISBN: 9780987447937

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In this anthology, our editor, Angela Meyer, has selected short stories and microfiction that range from the fantastical and macabre to the absurd. In Paddy O’Reilly’s Reality TV, a guest is confronted with her husband’s infidelity in front of a live audience and Ali Alizedah’s Truth and Reconciliation satirises American celebrity television. Chris Flynn’s Sealer’s Cove has a nudist caught in a time slip. Carmel Bird evokes Edgar Allan Poe when over-sized hares incite the good folk of rural Victoria to commit criminal acts and in Sticks and Stones, Ryan O’Neill has an academic attacked by a demonic alphabet.

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Sexy, scary, often strangely beautiful, these stories are a darkling delight.

—James Bradley

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Angela Meyer is a Melbourne-based writer and reviewer. Her fiction has been published in Seizure, Wet Ink & The Lifted Brow. She has written articles on books for many publications and has interviewed authors at festivals across Australia and overseas. A chapbook of her flash fiction will be published by Inkerman & Blunt in 2014. literaryminded.com.au

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Edited by Linda Godfrey & Julie Chevalier

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Publication Date: March, 2013 Paperback: 130 pages Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $22.99 ISBN: 9780987447906

the book

What do our best wordsmiths have to say about Australian icons?

This anthology takes a fresh look at everything from the HIH collapse to crocs, Margaret Olley, bush burials and the ABC. We visit a post-apocalyptic Opera House and spend Saturday night in downtown Byron Bay. Tones range from nostalgic to sceptical, from wry to LOL. Featuring prose poetry and microfiction by Mark O’Flynn, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson, Michael Sharkey, Moya Costello and many more.

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Sharp-edged, peculiar splinters of prose.

—John Tranter

Sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, provocative, self-reflective and self-satirising ... above all, a celebration of the many things Australia can mean to us.

— Newtown Review of Books

Edited by Linda Godfrey & Julie Chevalier

Small Wonder

Publication Date: May, 2012 Paperback: 128 pages Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $22.99 ISBN: 9780978089786 Book Design by Paden Hunter

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Here are short and clever pieces by thirty contemporary Australian writers on topics ranging from the eroticism of mash potato, parenting as magic realism and a tonguein-cheek history of the Cyclops bicycle. Each one is a creative blast straight from ‘brain stem to pen’ with ideas and insights that will blow your mind. Includes award-winning writers Michael Farrell, Keri Glastonbury, Judith Beveridge and Peter Boyle. It features prose poems and microfiction selected by competition judge, Joanne Burns.

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A treasure trove.

—Readings Monthly

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Joanne Burns writes poetry, monologues and short futurist fictions. Collections of her work has been published, the most recent being an Illustrated History of Dairies in 2007 and Amphora in 2011 by Giramondo Books. Kept Busy, a CD of Joanne Burns reading a selection of her work, was released in 2007 by River Road Publishing. Prose poems from On a Clear Day by UQP (1992) are included on the current HSC English syllabus. She is working on assembling a Selected Poems Collection and a new poetry collection, Brush.

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Carmel Bird

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Carmel Bird has updated her brilliant guide to those who are perplexed by writing. Dear Writer Revisited is a dazzling, humane and witty book which will be enlightening for anyone who picks it up, however experienced she or he may be.

This is a classic account of how to write. I know of nothing that equals it.

the specs Publication Date: October, 2013 Paperback: 150 pages Size: 203 x 133 mm RRP: $24.99 ISBN: 9780987447968 Available In:

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Dear Writer Revisited

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—Peter Craven

Dear Writer Revisited is a collection of letters from an experienced writer to a woman who has sent her own stories to be assessed. The book was first published, as Dear Writer, in 1988, when people used typewriters and primitive computers, and posted manuscripts off in envelopes. Although the way things are done has changed, the principles of writing fiction have not, as readers of the letters will realise.

This book about writing and the imagination is essential reading for any writer, emerging or experienced. It has been re-released with new material and updated advice for the twenty-first century writer.

the author Carmel Bird grew up in Tasmania and now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria. She has published two other books on writing: Writing the Story of Your Life and Not Now Jack - I'm Writing a Novel. As well as publishing many novels and collections of short fiction, she has edited several anthologies including The Penguin Century of Australian Stories and The Stolen Children - Their Stories. carmelbird@blogspot.com

I first read Dear Writer as a nervy, secretive scribbler-in-journals twenty years ago. Reading this revised version, I’m struck again by its practical generosity on technical matters – but I am also inspired by the deeper, more complex conversations I think I missed in those early readings: about courage, about the urgency and mystery and self-discovery of the writing process. Dear Writer Revisited may masquerade ̶ convincingly ̶ as a book for beginners, but its lessons are mature and wise.

—Charlotte Wood, the writer’s room interviews

‘Dear Writer Revisited is warm and nudging, firm and affirming.’ ̶ Angela Meyer

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Audio Only

Only at www.shortaustralianstories.com.au

Written by Van Roberts.

Duration: 23 minutes 25 seconds Price: $2.99

Me and the succubus

Written by Emilie Collyer.

Duration: 11 minutes 40 seconds Price: $2.99

The Other Guy

Written by Magdalena Ball.

Duration: 14 minutes Price: $2.99

Djarrawunang

Written by Louise D’Arcy.

Duration: 11 minutes 40 seconds Price: $2.99

Flat Daddy

Written by John Bartlett.

Duration: 13 minutes Price: $2.99

Mates

Written by Nikesh Murali.

Duration: 1 minute 50 seconds Price: $0.99

Translations

Written by Bridget Lutherburrow.

Duration: 3 minutes 50 seconds Price: $0.99

Once/Time

Written by Jon Steiner.

Duration: 7 minutes 30 seconds Price: $2.99

Robber

Written by John Bartlett.

Duration: 12 minutes 31 seconds Price: $2.99

Magnum Opus

Written by Anna Trembath.

Duration: 40 minutes Price: $2.99

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Digital Only

Only at Tomely & www.shortaustralianstories.com.au

Maree Dawes

brb: be right back

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Maree Dawes is a West Australian poet who has been published internationally. Her first collection, Women of the Minotaur, explored the lives of mistresses in Picasso’s life. It was featured on ABC radio’s Poetica in May 2009 and dramatised for the program launch at the Perth International Arts Festival 2010. Her short story, I Am So Sweet and Truthful, is in production for a short film. Her verse novel, brb: be right back (Spineless Wonders, 2014) will be launched at this year’s Perth Writers Festival. mareedawes.com

eBook: ePub, Mobi & PDF Platform: tomely & spinelesswonders RRP: $9.99 e-ISBN: 9780987447913 Available Only In:

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Publication Date: February, 2014

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Partner away and home alone but for the sleeping children, our protagonist joins online chat. She and her family moved to the country, and she’s been bored and disconnected.

As online life becomes more technicoloured than the real thing, she makes friends, learns the lingo and ponders the meaning of fidelity, humanity and living in the moment.

This verse novel uses the language and shape of online chat, email, fragments and stream of consciousness to take the reader headfirst into the world of online life in the nineties. It’s a chance to experience the beginnings of social networking with the humour, excitement and dilemmas it can pose.

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brb: be right back – an exciting addition to the verse novel genre – is a blend of lyric, narrative poetry, and cyber-discourse.

— Barbara Temperton, west australian poet

The Carmel Bird Award

Competitions such as this have always been very important to new writers. They provide a kind of excitement and hope. They give the story a destination and a validation, says Carmel Bird.

Each year, competition finalists are offered prizes and the opportunity to be published in print, digital or audio platforms. Every two years, the award takes the form of a short story competition with winning stories published in an anthology.

The entry conditions vary in terms of word length, theme or entrant profile.

Women’s Long Stories In 2012, The Carmel Bird Award took the form of a competition for long stories between 4-10,000 words, and was open to women writers only. Our Judge was Amanda Lohrey, the recent recipient of the Patrick White Literary Award. The twelve long-listed authors were published in the Amanda Lohrey Selects, a series of digital eSingles.

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This award was established in 2011 by Spineless Wonders, a publishing house that specialises in short Australian stories. It is named after a leading author, editor, creative writing teacher and long-time advocate of short fiction.

Sue Booker explores how people of widely differing beliefs, opinions and philosophies can build lasting connections, through her sensitive development of two characters and their fragile relationship - from their initial forgotten encounter to a terrible and disturbing ending.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

Marian Matta's heartbreaking and sometimes raw portrayal, reveals the emotional torment and sense of isolation for an individual under siege from social intolerance while dealing with the confusion and uncertainty of an inner legitimacy.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

Holly shares an apartment with Lisa and her boyfriend, Rod. When Lisa disappears without a trace, Holly takes a live-in caretaker's position at a seaside hotel. In Empty Rooms, Sue Goldstiver delivers an edgy narrative that maintains an unsettling and intriguing tension.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

As a child, Geraldine spent school holidays with her grandparents on their country property. Her recollections are filled with family and natural beauty. Years later, while visiting with her widowed grandmother, Geraldine learns of a shocking secret that will forever change her childhood perceptions.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

Easy-going Orley has, until recently, enjoyed a casual lifestyle, running an ageing caravan park in a rundown resort town, surrounded by a family he loves and on whom he has largely depended. But nothing ever stays the same and foundations are threatened.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

When Berenice, a retired nun, discovers she has only months to live, her mind turns to the experiences and desires she has spent a lifetime denying.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

Samuel is a university drop-out looking for direction in his life.

He is lured out one evening by a co-worker, Josh, with the promise of an unforgettable experience.

Sam agrees to go, but becomes increasingly anxious as the evening unfolds. What he discovers at their final destination terrifies him.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

Audrey and Steven Trott live on the Oasis Estate - a new, gated community marketed as a private and exclusive coastal retreat selling the dream of the ideal lifestyle. Encased by bush and ocean, it promises a safe sanctuary resplendent in beauty, relaxation and exclusivity. Or does it?

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

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Z works within Treasury in a government where knowledge and alliances are power, and people are bought, used and manipulated.

Corbett's convincingly intriguing characters and narrative gives an insight into an alternative reality. It will keep you guessing to the end.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

esingles

Stephanie is a young girl who escapes into the imaginary world of Toodleton where she is a hero, not a victim. Belinda Rule takes us on an emotional journey, fixing our gaze on a child's lonely plight that is frightening as it is heartbreaking.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

SW

This is a poignant account of how childhood objects, places, people and events become infused with a lasting meaning from our earliest years. Finn’s highly effective use of language, opens the window into a child’s unique perspective.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

the

Rani's new neighbours want to replace the old fence between their yards. But for Rani, the fence is no mere boundary. E. Ratnam Keese offers a unique voice and perspective that challenges us to reflect on when we last considered perspectives from the other side.

Price: $0.99 | ePub, Mobi & PDF tomely & spinelesswonders

Two cars travel towards each other on a long stretch of highway. Different lives, different preoccupations. Inside both vehicles, the tension is building. In Black Opal, a short story from Damaged In Transit, Manning takes us on a thrilling ride in outback Australia.

Price: $1.99 | Format: ePub, Mobi & PDF | Platform: tomely & spinelesswonders

Kelly always wanted to be a vet, but working at a pet shop on Saturdays was as close as she could get to that dream. At least it meant she was close to animals. It also meant she could be away from Croc, the biker she’d left home to live with.

Croc is a short story from Pierz Newton-John's Fault Lines.

Price: $1.99 | Format: ePub, Mobi & PDF | Platform: tomely & spinelesswonders

Meant, one of Julie Chevalier’s linked gaol stories, is set in Sydney’s Long Bay Gaol. If you enjoy this story, you might enjoy reading the rest of Julie’s collection of short stories in her anthology, Permission To Lie. Price: $0.99 | Format: ePub, Mobi & PDF | Platform: tomely & spinelesswonders

When the narrator and her female partner make a treechange, they come face-to-face with the darker side of rural community life. Read this haunting story from Jane Skelton’s short story collection, Lives of the Dead.

Price: $1.99 | Format: ePub, Mobi & PDF | Platform: tomely & spinelesswonders

— Nicholas Birn, editor of antipodes

new releases

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Cracking The Spine is the most innovative resource in Australian literature I have seen in many years. An anthology of contemporary short stories, each with a commentary by their authors, the collection breaks down the wall between the creative and discursive, the imagistic and the expository. Filled with cutting-edge, innovative writers and armed with an expansive definition of what it is to be an Australian, Cracking the Spine will be at once accessible to undergraduate students and informative and challenging for their teachers. What a thrill to see a work like this come about!

the

SW

new releases

2014

20.

Fourteen

In 1738, English preacher, Isaac Watts, wrote The world to come, a Christian tract about departed souls, death and the glory or terror of the resurrection. Almost 300 years later, the world to come still fascinates readers. It's not only climate change, it's the climate of everything: from technological advances that threaten to create an immortal humanity; to an endless war on terror; to a thousand visions of post-apocalyptic life in the media. The world to come is everywhere; it is with us now. In this anthology, twenty-one writers respond to the world to come, the one just around the corner, the hereafter and the everywhen.

New voices, new ideas, refreshed old ones and all in degustation morsels to get those creative and imaginative juices flowing. There are terse epigrams full of resonance and affect, gnomish haikus of condensed truth, pithy aphorisms from Melbourne to Marrakesh, from Sydney to Paris.’ Kathleen Mary Fallon

new releases

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2014

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new releases

20.

Fourteen

‘Here is tight, thoughtful writing that stays with the reader after the page is closed.’ Shady Cosgrove

Every word counts when writers craft their stylish narratives in just half a page. Flashing The Square, the companion book of screen-sized stories flashed across Melbourne's Federation Square, is packed with the best micro-literature from around Australia. These 200-word gems sparkle with life, love, laughs, politics and poetry. ANGELA MEYER

Print Distribution & Trade Orders

Online Retailers

Publishers & Suppliers:

orders

&

stockists

Dennis Jones & Associates Unit 1/10 Melrich Road Bayswater, Victoria 3153, Australia

T: 61 (0)3 9762 9100 F: 61 (0)3 9762 9200 theoffice@dennisjones.com.au

Independent Stockists NSW: Booktique, Merimbula; UNSW Bookshop, Kensington; Hill of Content, Balmain; Gleebooks, Glebe; Better Read Than Dead, Newtown; McLeans Books, Newcastle; Kinokuniya, Sydney; The Bookshop, Darlinghurst; Berkelouw, Leichhardt; Abbeys Bookshop, Sydney; The Dust Jacket, Inverell; Banjo Books, Epping; Megalong Books, Megalong Valley; The Constant Reader, Crows Nest; The Bookshop, Bowral; Book Bazaar, Umina.

QLD: Another Story, Rockhampton; Tea House Books, Brisbane; The Book House, Noosaville; Avid Reader, Brisbane; Coaldrake’s Bookshop, Brisbane, Mary Ryans; Rosetta, Melany.

VIC: Avenue Books, Albert Park; Bellcourt Books, Hamilton; Brunswick Bound, Brunswick; Eltham Bookshop, Eltham; Hill of Content, Melbourne; Readings, Carlton; Readings, St Kilda; Matilda Bookshop, Mount Waverley; The Paperback Bookshop, Melbourne; Dymocks Southland, Cheltehnham; Dymocks, Bendigo; Swinburne Bookshop, Melbourne, Embiggen, Melbourne; Foster’s Little Bookshop, Gippsland; Torquay Books; Thesaurus, Brighton.

ACT: Electric Shadows; Candello; National Library Bookshop.

WA: Westbooks; Paperbark Books, Albany; Boffins, Perth.

NT: CDU Bookshop; Dymocks, Casuarina.

TAS: Fullers Bookshop, Hobart.

Co-op Bookshops nationally.

New Zealand: Unity Books, Wellington.

Enquiries General: bronwyn@shortaustralianstories.com.au Overseas orders: info@shortaustralianstories.com.au

Customer:

Dennis Jones & Associates

ABN 37 064 871 665 1/10 Melrich RoaD Bayswater Vic 3153 P: 03 9762 9100 | F: 03 9762 9200 | E: orders@dennisjones.com.au

Address: Date:

Order Form QTY

ISBN

Order No.:

Title

Author

RRP

Single Author Collection 9780987254603

Damaged in Transit

Mary Manning

$22.99

9780987089762

Fault Lines

Pierz Newton-John

$22.99

9780987254689

Lives of the Dead

Jane Skelton

$22.99

9780978089700

Permission to Lie

Julie Chevalier

$22.99

9780987089724

The Rattler & Other Stories

A.S. Patrić

$22.99

9781925052008

The Glove Box & Other Stories

Vivienne Plumb

$24.99

9780987447975

White Light

Mark O’Flynn

$22.99

Anthologies – Short Stories 9780987089748

Escape

Ed: Bronwyn Mehan

$27.99

9780987447937

The Great Unknown

Ed: Angela Meyer

$27.99

Anthologies – Prose Poems/Microfiction 9780987447906

Stoned Crows & Other Australian Icons

Ed: Julie Chevalier & Linda Godfrey

$22.99

9780987089786

Small Wonder

Ed: Linda Godfrey & Julie Chevalier

$22.99

9780987447968

Dear Writer Revisited

Carmel Bird

$24.99

Books on Writing

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