Edition 34
The Annual Fiction Edition
- Published 6th December, 2011
- ISBN: 9781921758232
- Extent: 232 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
These stories explore offshore coal ships and urban no-man’s land; islands of traditional culture within the mainstream to the personal seclusion of grief or vulnerability.
This third annual collection of new fiction features many authors poised to make the leap to the national stage, including Sally Breen, Favel Parrett, Nicolas Low and Rachael S Morgan.
In addition, the edition features new stories and memoir from award-winning authors Georgia Blain, Craig Cliff, Chris Womersley, Melissa Luchashenko, Ashley Hay and Benjamin Law, plus much more.
Griffith REVIEW 34 also includes the announcement of the winners of the 2011 Griffith REVIEW-CAL Emerging Writer’s (GREW) Prize, awarded annually to emerging writers published in Griffith REVIEW this year whose work has been deemed most original and influential.
The Annual Fiction Edition presents an archipelago of islands to discover and is a collectable companion to the 2009 and 2010 Griffith REVIEW fiction anthologies.
In this Edition
Post-nuclear
In this special, festive edition of our summer-reading program, Griffith Review returns to 'Post-nuclear', Benjamin Law's brief and moving treatise on Christmas – what it means and how that meaning evolves as family changes – from Griffith Review 34: The Annual Fiction Edition. Benjamin Law...
Archipelago
A THIRD-GENERATION Asia-born waiguoren – foreigner – I lived until I was eight in Peking, and remember my father wondering aloud whether we were European enough to live anywhere else and, in the same breath, whether we were Chinese enough to remain. That question...
Finding a florist in Lidcombe
I AM STANDING on the train platform, twelve years old. Too old for dolls and dress-ups, too young for lipstick and love. I am bewildered, lost; this space overwhelms me, this crowd pushes me down into the February-hot asphalt. In my navies and creams,...
Interview with
Chris Womersley
Having read your online bio, I have to ask: do you really have trained monkeys? How much do you wish you did? Would they communicate telepathically with you so all your work remains authentically yours?Ah, the trained monkeys have prompted quite a bit of...
Interview with
Favel Parrett
Your story 'No Man is an Island' is strikingly short – in fact, it's the shortest story in The Annual Fiction Edition. Did you make a conscious decision to write it this way?I never intend for my stories to be so short. They usually...
Interview with
Amy Espeseth
You immigrated to Australia in the late 1990's from rural Wisconsin. Your story in Griffith REVIEW 34: The Annual Fiction Edition, 'Free Lunch' takes place in rural Wisconsin – does your writing offer a way to explore place, and where you've made a home...
Interview with
Craig Cliff
You've travelled quite a bit – you seem to be an adventurer of the world, but also an explorer of your mind and its possibilities. Could you explain how this affects your writing?All the stories in my first book were written in the midst...
Interview with
Nicolas Low
In addition to being a writer, you're an installation artist, among other things. Do you think writing and art provide any similar skills, or a specific pleasure? Does your writing cross over into your installation work, or vice versa?For me they're very different ways...
Interview with
Romy Ash
As we're conducting this interview via email, could describe your current environment?I am writing in my studio, which is in the Sample House building, quite near the Victoria Markets. It is a studio that I share with seven other writers, The Lifted Brow magazine...
Interview with
Rachael S Morgan
This year you won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for literature with your story 'Tryst' – a vivid tale about the 'loss of innocence' – how did this further your writing?It's such an honour to win the prize and it has enabled me to be...
The middle of nowhere
DRUG ADDICTION IS 98 per cent hunger, 2 per cent feast; you get accustomed to bad news. But I had no inkling when I picked up the phone on that grim afternoon that what Anna told me would propel us even deeper into the...
Sunny Lodge
MICHAEL THINKS ABOUT the sounds Rachel is making. Little whinnies like she's losing motivation. Michael knows what that feels like. Even listening to her doesn't really fuss him, not like it does Rory. Michael knows Rory's committed presence on Friday nights is more about...
Forgetting
WHEN SHE'S STILL waiting at 8.25, she is forced to accept that he won't be arriving. A cloudy sunset seeps through half-cracked Venetian blinds, filling the room with milky gold. Thin beams of light reflect on her from the full-length mirror. She stands in...
The big one-eyed dork
YOU JIBBER, NED. You are the worst jibberer I know. It's incessant. Stop it – just stop it for the rest of the day and you can start afresh tomorrow.Ned takes my criticism well. I know, I know, he says. Sorry. But he's smiling,...
Searching for Monty
WHEN MY GRANDPA lived in the house near the bay, the old wooden house with the jacaranda trees in front and splintered grey floorboards on the verandah, they would take afternoon walks down the hill and along the waterfront, under the Moreton Bay figs...
The new capital
THE FOLLOWING YEAR they went to Japan.In the night they landed at Kansai Airport, then took a train to Shin-Osaka. In the morning, after an early breakfast, they took the fast train to Okayama and then changed for an omnibus to Matsuyama. In Matsuyama,...
The lovers
FRIDAY WAS THEIR day. They always arrived just after twelve, before the lunch hour got into full swing. They took their table, under the side window, looking over the flowerbox of deep-red geraniums. And they always ordered the same meal, the goulash soup we're...
Underwater
'WHAT DO YOU reckon it's about?' she says.'Yeah,' he says, looking up from his mobile for a moment, then back to the screen.'My dream,' she says, but he doesn't reply.She looks out the train window. Futons are hung out over sunny balcony railings. It...
Elsie’s house
IT WAS EARLY in the morning when she fell, and the sun coming in through the back door made a triangle on the kitchen floor. From where she lay, quite comfortably tucked on the thick green carpet between the sofa and the sideboard, she...
Free lunch
HE DIDN'T LIKE being considered middle-aged, let alone a senior citizen. Not that he minded the savings now and again, ordering off the seniors' breakfast menu and getting his sunny-side-up eggs, bacon and wheat toast, no butter, for ninety-nine cents cheaper. But to hear...
Tryst
IN 1985 I am twelve. The tropical north is nirvana, especially for a child previously so tightly pressed by English winters, closed footwear and the flat, grey monotony of a council estate. Townsville sighs into me with hot, wet breath, bringing me undone. I...
No man is an island
IT WAS THE best part of the day when Mr Peters read to us.He was reading a book that he had written and it was about some kids that had found a portal through time. I don't remember what it was called or the...
Enlarged + heart + child
WEDNESDAY IS DOG day. Or dog afternoon, to be more precise. In fact, it's really only a twenty-minute distraction, but when you have so little to cling to you take what you can get.This week Shelly has Max, a quiet brown Labrador, and Annie...
Continental drift
ALL SHE THOUGHT about was leaving for England. There was nowhere else to go. America, of course, but America was big and brash and she was neither. She was a sweet, dreamy innocent, so America would not suit her at all. At least that's...
Octopus
AT TEN THE sun finally sets and the pub fills up and the news comes on. It's my round. A couple of aunties up the back give me a nod but everyone else looks pakeha. The publican looks at my tarred hands. You must...
Friday night at the Nudgel
JO WRAPPED HER arm around the square green veranda post of the Billinudgel pub and cursed her best friend to hell and back. Being Therese's latest pet project was like being clobbered by an avalanche of goodwill. She had been unstoppable on the phone...
Mrs Dogwether’s bird moment
MRS DOGWETHER'S FRONT door is open but I don't go in because it smells like chops and cat poo in there. I stand on the doormat and sing out helloo-oo like a tremulous old Mavis. It's dark inside. I can't hear anything. Maybe she's sitting...
A matter of instinct
THE ESTATE AGENT suggests a three-month lease to start. 'A bit isolated. Usually rent it out as a holiday place to families.' And for a moment the woman thinks he will ask about her family. About a husband, children. But he just shows her...
The tank
IT FEELS GOOD to have the sun on him. To press his body into the sand, the hot wind across his bare skin finally drying out the open sores across his back, and across the backs of his arms and his legs.He stretches his...
Offshore service
'WHAT DO YOU call a Kiwi with a harem?' Bernie asked over the intercom, hardly pausing for a response. 'A shepherd.''Good one, Bern,' Anton said. He pulled up gently on the collective and we rose further above the small lagoon and scruffy trees on...
An abstract art
IM Emily Kame Kngwarreye Outrageous, the flag of beautyas day revolves to night, a skythick with stars that fall like snow,snow that feints shapes andculls sound and muffles distance –a white shroud for realism. Faithis made manifest in an abstract art,the dreaming eye that trusts...
Islands
i dream of islands, glass-bottom boats, waters clearand safe as houses before they're bombedfish scales, slippery as yesterday's newsi dream in islands, swimming in sea chambers / among coralfish teeth lodge themselves on my dinner platei dream of mary, my mother's mother's motherand many...
Sighting Rottnest
Rottnest Island (Wadjemup) – 32°S 115°31'E – 18 km off shore – Western Australia AUTUMN rough serious blue seapale sky, pale spiregreen grey island All that year I caught the train to and from work, swaying silently, waiting for the stretch between North Fremantle and Cottesloe. Or...
His grandfather
What was he thinking of, coming here?A new world? A rich initiativeFor a young body raised in an old country?He brought with him all the old conceptsTo join with others already here.There was no new world. He brought with him illusionsIn large measure. It...
Featured Contributors
Benjamin Law
Benjamin Law is the author of The Family Law, Gaysia and the Quarterly Essay: Moral Panic 101, and editor of Growing Up Queer in...
Ashley Hay
Ashley Hay is a former editor of Griffith Review, a former literary editor of The Bulletin, and a prize-winning...
Georgia Blain (1964–2016)
Georgia Blain published numerous novels, short stories and essays, with her work often being short-listed for major literary awards....
Chris Womersley
Chris Womersley is the author of three acclaimed novels, The Low Road (Scribe, 2007), Bereft (Scribe, 2010) and Cairo (Scribe, 2013), all of which...
