Edition 30
The Annual Fiction Edition
- Published 7th December, 2010
- ISBN: 9781921656187
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
As economic, political and cultural power moves from North America and Europe to the Asia-Pacific, Australia is enjoying a new relationship with its neighbours.
The shift of individuals and ideas across borders is giving rise to new voices in literature.
This highly anticipated edition features sparkling new short fiction by established and emerging writers from around the Pacific Rim and Australia who are engaging with the region, including Peter Temple, Janette Turner Hospital, Nick Earls, Eva Hornung, Kate Holden, Alice Pung and many more.
Packed with great summer reading, this edition also includes the announcement of the 2010 winners of the Griffith REVIEW Emerging Writers’ Prize.
In this Edition
The field marker
OUR FATHER, WHO survived the Killing Fields, would never let me travel to South-East Asia when I was a student, so the first time I visited Cambodia was when I was twenty-nine, with him and my sister Alison. In the plane, he warned us...
Don Quixote in Shanghai
'GLAD YOU MADE it,′ said my friend. 'I cannot but believe,′ said I to myself, 'that when the history of my famous achievements shall be given to the world, the learned author will begin it in this very manner, when he comes to give...
Study for the weather station
WE DIDN'T KNOW so much; we knew how to touch. We unpacked our boxes in the box on the cliff. We thought we had time. We stayed for a season. Salt crystals bigger than sugar cubes formed on the spoons. Stereo circuitry went mushy...
Passing judgement
THE TWO JUDGES sat on an enclosed veranda. The apartment at the end of the peninsula looked over the West River to a row of ugly factories on the Chinese side. This was the less fashionable side of Penha Hill, although when Judge Luis...
Icing and salt
AFTER THE INITIAL impact, Eiji's feet slide backwards, carving tracks through the salted clay until his toes grip the straw bales at the edge of the ring. Everything stops, as if he has thrown out an anchor. His skin is wet with sweat. Cameras...
Without country
THE RIGGER COILED the line of wet rope around his hand, reeling in the sea crate they were using as a makeshift raft. 'Look up,' he said, pushing down on one edge of the crate, seesawing the man lying on top.'Where are we?''Look up.'The...
The sun rising
'THIS IS HOW it was, when I saw you for the first time.'When Mackenzie Lachlan butted up against the side of Australia he was twenty-five, with nowhere in particular to go and no one in particular to be. Walking up from his ship's anchorage...
Steeplechase
MY SISTER LIKES ponies and showjumping and arenas. Sometimes I jump with her because she wants me to. I throw my head back and make the horse's sound but it is never the right sound. She corrects me with her perfect whinnying, neck exposed,...
The farmer
IT WAS THE farmer who built the shack, when he was a young man, long before I was born. By the time I knew him, he was an old man, his hair so white that it was impossible to tell its original colour. His...
The Fever
THE DUSK SETTLES over a day in late autumn. The sun sets above the East Henan plain, a blood-red ball turning the earth and sky a deep shade of crimson. As red unfurls, slowly the dusk turns to evening. Autumn grows deeper; the cold...
The geometry lesson
THERE WERE THREE things I knew then that time has never erased.We made a triangle, back when we lived on the curved banks of the Murrumbidgee. My mother was the angle on the top, and my father and I were the two beneath.'Ten minutes,′...
Cedric abroad
CEDRIC MARCHANT LEFT England for the first time at the age of forty-one. He travelled to France by train and boat at the insistence of his sister, Freda, who had gone to live in the Dordogne with a painter from Leeds who called himself...
The inexact science of Fredericka
MY NAME IS Fredericka. Every night, I find myself in the same room. Thankfully, it is coloured to my taste: black wallpaper, and the glow of a red light bulb. It is too dark to read, but I like the ambience.I light raspberry-rose incense....
Scene from a window
FRIDAY MORNING. GREENWICH Village.The industrial dumbwaiter, jam-packed with a two-day accumulation of tenants′ rubbish, made three trips from the basement of the elegant apartment block to the street.A team of janitors removed a pile of dark plastic rubbish bags to a corner wall of...
Republic of Outer Barcoo
JODIE'S DESK IN the Capitol building in Wirranbandi is a scratched and gouged door resting across two wooden saw-horses in a room that was once the lobby and teller area of a bank. The room is rather grand, with high ceilings and ornate mouldings...
Panther
WALKING ON TRAIN tracks is unnatural. The distance between the wooden sleepers is just longer than a normal footstep, so you have to look down constantly to make sure you don′t stumble. Staring along the railway line is disorienting, almost sickening. When you look...
The infernal wood
THE FOOTFALL OF the horse was muted in soft ground and leaf litter. The path ahead glimmered with an undersheen of pale clay – forgotten gold, maybe. The forest was riddled with tunnels, had once teemed with frenzied digging, shaking, boring. It had been...
The circle line
THE COME CLATTERING down the stairwells and surge onto the platform around her: revoltingly young, for the most part, and energetic too, striding, laughing, chatting, texting, bouncing and bobbing to the music in their earphones. Marilyn feels exhausted just looking at them. She presses...
A grove of olives
ONCE I HAD to bury a cat. She was a beautiful cat, lithe of limb, delicate, a great leaper. Slender and brown, a long-legged, silky-furred Burmese. She was called Dido, for reasons important at the time. When my neighbour knocked on the door and...
Skylights
GORDON NEVER RUNS his own errands but he banged on my door at 4 am and ordered me to catch the under-the-radar dawn flight to Emergent.'I don't know if you've heard,' I said, standing in the doorway in my underpants, 'but there's a civil...
My fall in Calcutta
Calcutta is a big, middle-class, air-conditioned city. My publisher′s chauffeur was waiting for me at the airport. Through the tinted windows of the sedan, the vast traffic jams warned me that, whether I liked it or not, things could get complicated in the city...
The magnificent Amberson
The toilet was not what I had expected. Still less the porn.The pedestal in the bathroom of our executive suite at the Roumei Beauty Hotel looked like something built for astronauts, or a movie prop, or a tangent that design had taken in the...
Dead Sea Psalms
The moon and sun cohabit the sky. The world turns.Outside the citadel, a child climbs the tamarisk.From the topmost branch with strength enoughto bear her, she offers up her song. Under this sun,she sings, it were better to be born a bird.Every falling star...
Sorry Rocks
At Uluruthe postman returns rocksthat look like they’ve beenchipped off a sunset.They arrive in padded bags,shoeboxes, take-away containersfrom all over the world,apologetic tourists trying to make goodor simply finding the rocklost its strange orange glowin the European light.Some are stopped en route,quarantine confiscating the...
Circumstances
Lee Miller's Famous FotoShe was in the bathbeautifully readywhen the phone rang.Her boots, bloodedwith the mud of Auschwitz,stood to attention.There was a picture of Hitlerand other knick-knacks lined up against the wallto be shot.He pressed the shutterand raced to answer. Richard FarrellThe car had wrapped itself(but...
Barry
Ringing on a Sunday yourLondon doorbell holding the bookour friend Max insistsyou must have by handI find you like Everyman rumpledbetween one week′s end andthe start of the next, forgettingyesterday was Paris and tomorrowyour flightto Sydney. So while Lizzie(whose beauty Time won′t laya hand...
Featured Contributors
Kris Kneen
Kris Kneen is the award-winning author of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, including An Uncertain Grace, which was shortlisted for...
Alice Pung
Alice Pung is a Melbourne writer, editor and lawyer. Her first novel, Unpolished Gem (Black Inc., 2006) became the...
Nick Earls
Nick Earls is the author of twenty-seven books for adults, teenagers and children. His novels have won awards in...
Janette Turner Hospital
Janette Turner Hospital taught in Queensland high schools before her academic career in the USA. Since 1999, she has...
