In light of recent events
Who’s preferencing whom?November 2007
Arts & Letters
‘Mini Shots’ 1–9 by various authors
Violence, obsession, addiction: these themes thread together the new Mini Shots series, with often disquieting results. Each pocket-sized story - individually bound with striking cover art by Melbourne photographer Bronwen Hyde - is absorbing, but taken together they tend to the bleak. In Emmett Stinson’s ‘Something So Helpless’, David rallies against a seedy society of hostility and decay to rescue a kitten: “He was Pandora in reverse - this shoebox contained the last bit of innocence in existence. It was the evil of the world that was trying to get in.” David’s life is claustrophobic and cruel; there are stabbings and shootings on his doorstep. His concern for the kitten reassures us that he isn’t wholly inured to it all.
In Lucy Lawson’s ‘Juice’, two lovers try to hold a toxic world at (matchstick-thin) arm’s length through fasting. Rachael quarantines herself from “plastics, power lines and pesticides” in a claw-footed porcelain bathtub in the backyard. In their self-imposed isolation, these characters are “half-awake”, “unbalanced”, “dizzy” - wanting finally to be “empty of everything”. Similarly, the characters in Ed Moreno’s ‘Pine’ long for escape. Theirs is an olfactory journey, where pine-perfumed disinfectant only thinly veils the stink of a less salubrious reality: grubby video booths in a strip club, drugs, desperation. Riikka longs for the warmth and familiarity of her “gran’s jasmine-scented perfume” and resents the “cardboard pine tree dangling from the rear-view mirror”, which has “lost all its scent”.
But there is, happily, also some hope: in Sarah Jansen’s ‘Dragon Dust’, Velvet itches and chafes against a world where she is tethered to the “hunger and noise and dirt” of her children, moored to a town in which the “wooden houses and buildings all seemed directed inwards”. She escapes to the hills to breathe and swing her arms “in wide, exaggerated arcs”, where she is finally, gloriously, released.
Each Mini Shot resonates in its own haunting key. These stories, all of them by emerging Australian authors and released across the year by a small independent publishing house, are often raw and demanding: ten-minute fiction with a lot to say.
Ghost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianist
The quip and the dead: Steve Toltz’s ‘Here Goes Nothing’
A bleakly satirical look at death and the afterlife from the wisecracking author of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’
Election special: Who should you vote for?
Undecided about who to vote for in the upcoming federal election? Take our quiz to find out your least-worst option!
Kill your idol
Andrew Dominik’s ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’Eco-worriers
Michael Pollan’s ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ & Bill McKibben’s ‘Deep Economy’
Lies that tell the truth
The paradox of art and creative writing
The principle of necessity
Justice Menhennitt & Australia’s Roe v WadeThe quip and the dead: Steve Toltz’s ‘Here Goes Nothing’
A bleakly satirical look at death and the afterlife from the wisecracking author of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’Ghost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianist
One small step: ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ and ‘Deep Water’
Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped film evokes the optimism of late-1960s America, while Patricia Highsmith’s thriller gets another disappointing adaptation
Art heist: The landmark conviction of an Aboriginal art centre’s manager
The jailing of Mornington Island Art’s chief executive for dishonest dealing has shone a light on ethics and colonialism in the Indigenous art world
‘Loveland’
Robert Lukins’ second novel takes a Brisbane woman to Nebraska, where an inheritance sparks a change in character as well as in fortune
‘We Own This City’
David Simons, creator of ‘The Wire’, returns to Baltimore for a present-day examination of rapacious police corruption
‘Slow Horses’
A sardonic Gary Oldman heads a misfit branch of MI5 in Apple TV+’s thrilling exploration of personal motivation and political expedience
‘The Golden Cockerel’
Barrie Kosky’s Adelaide production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera satirising the Russo-Japanese War came with uneasy resonancesElection special: Who should you vote for?
Undecided about who to vote for in the upcoming federal election? Take our quiz to find out your least-worst option!
Remembrance or forgetting?
The Australian War Memorial and the Great Australian Silence
Property damage
What will it take for Australia to fix the affordable housing crisis?
Present indicative: Daniel Johns’ ‘FutureNever’
The former Silverchair frontman’s second solo album lacks cohesion, but affords him space to excavate his past
