Earthly Delights – The Novella Project IV

Edition 54

Earthly Delights – The Novella Project IV

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Published 1st November, 2016
ISBN: 9781925355543
Extent: 264pp
Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

Griffith Review once again showcases some of the best new Australian fiction with its fourth novella competition, Earthly Delights.

Judges for this edition were novelist and Novella Project III winner Nick Earls; publisher and Stella Prize founder Aviva Tuffield; and creative writing lecturer and novelist Sally Breen.

The winning entries range widely in theme, voice and style. Suzanne McCourt boldly ruminates on sexual taboos; Stephen Orr explores the nuances of the student–teacher bond; Graham Lang finds unlikely tenderness in a bleak ending; Melanie Cheng walks the line between inspiration and desire in life and art; and Daniel Jenkins plunges into the day-to-day negotiations of Westerners in the Middle East. Earthly Delights also features the final words of fiction in Cory Taylor’s wonderful and enduring written legacy.

Earthly Delights – The Novella Project IV was supported through the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

In this Edition

Learning to read

THE AMERICAN WRITER on the festival circuit had refined his message into this decade’s preferred mode of communication: a list. He identified five points. Just as five is a useful number for a child using her fingers to learn to count, it is handy...

By Julianne Schultz

Interview with
Melanie Cheng

Melanie Cheng is a Melbourne-based writer and practising GP. ‘Muse’, published in Griffith Review 54: Earthly Delights, is part of a collection of short fiction, Australia Day, which was awarded the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. In this interview, Cheng explains...

By Lauren Mitchell

Interview with
Graham Lang

Graham Lang is an artist and writer who has published three novels: Clouds Like Black Dogs (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2003), Place of Birth (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2006) and Lettah’s Gift (UQP, 2011). His novella ‘A Fulcrum of Infinities’, published in Griffith Review 54: Earthly...

By Lauren Mitchell

Interview with
Daniel Jenkins

Daniel Jenkins grew up in New South Wales. He has spent most of the past ten years living in Asia and the Middle East, teaching and writing. His novella ‘Those Boys From Jalaan’ is set in a Middle Eastern country and focuses on the...

By Lauren Mitchell

Interview with
Suzanne McCourt

Suzanne McCourt’s first novel The Lost Child (Text, 2014) was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2015. Her novella ‘The Last Taboo: A Love Story’, published in Griffith Review 54: Earthly Delights, is a confronting story about the fraught relationship that develops between a mother and son reunited in...

By Lauren Mitchell

Interview with
Stephen Orr

Based in Adelaide, Stephen Orr has published several novels, and has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and twice for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. His novella ‘Datsunland’ explores the hesitant bond that develops between a reluctant music teacher and his teenage student...

By Lauren Mitchell

Muse

I’VE NEGLECTED HER. Her ceilings are soft with cobwebs. Her garden is choked with weeds. Her fence leans, like buckteeth, out onto the footpath. She is getting old, and noisy. Like me, with my snorts and grunts and farts that catch even me by surprise....

By Melanie Cheng

A fulcrum of infinities

SAUL TURNS OFF the bitumen onto the dirt road and drives due west. The ute rattles along over the corrugated track; its tyres rumble over cattle grids between immense pastures. The land before him flat and featureless; everything – the rocks, sand and thin scrub –...

By Graham Lang

Those boys from Jalaan

RACHEL THERE WAS A cement wall separating the compound from the desert. The wall was three metres high. Purple wildflowers grew at its base, and would fall to the ground in heavy winds. During sandstorms, while the desert spluttered and sank from view, the lower part...

By Daniel Jenkins (dec.)

The last taboo: A love story

HE INSISTS ON a hotel room. You want him to stay with your family – you, Graeme and daughters, Sal and Janie. I want you to stay with your sisters. You almost say this on the phone but change it to half-sisters in your head...

By Suzanne McCourt

Datsunland

WILLIAM DUTTON WAS still walking towards school. Two decades after he’d finished, still. Carrying his guitar, head down, mumbling to himself, resenting that he had to go, waste another day, fill in shitty little forms that he always got wrong, screwed up, started again,...

By Stephen Orr

The white experiment

FOREWORDBy Penny HuestonCORY TAYLOR, WHO passed away in July, was a joy to work with. Over the years I was her editor at Text, we became close friends. This extract in Griffith Review, a literary magazine much admired by Cory, is from The White Experiment, the...

By Cory Taylor (dec.)