In this arresting and richly imaginative collection of twelve stories. Gail Jones explores the role of obsession the inescapable loves and torments she calls fetishes - in the lives of both the famous and the ordinary. Structured around a series of lyrical echoes and repeated images, her stories weave fact and speculation to recreate little-known events in the lives of such figures as Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, and Elvis Presley that may have motivated their art and obsessed them as individuals.

Fetish Lives

Literature & Fiction

Jones, Gail

Short Stories & Anthologies

George Braziller, Inc.

A Picador Paperback Original 
On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House and the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious surroundings and the play of light on water. 
But just as Circular Quay resonates with Australia's past, each of the four carries a complicated history from elsewhere. Each person is haunted by past secrets and guilt. Ellie is preoccupied by her sexual experiences as a girl, James by a tragedy for which he feels responsible, Catherine by the loss of her beloved brother in Dublin, and Pei Xing by her imprisonment during China's Cultural Revolution. 
Told over the course of a single Saturday, Five Bells describes four lives that come to share not only a place and a time but also mysterious patterns and ambiguous symbols, including a barely glimpsed fifth figure, a young child. By nightfall, when Sydney is drenched in a summer rainstorm, each life will have been transformed by the events of this day.

Five Bells: A Novel

Literary

Picador

Who knew that gecko feet inspired scientists to develop a stickier adhesive or that cockleburs in dog fur led to the invention of Velcro? Discovery Engineering in Physical Science uses these and other surprising cases of innovations sparked by accidental observations to teach about the amazing role of serendipity in science. The case studies in this new resource are a lively way to integrate engineering into your physical science classes. Middle and high school students will learn to understand fundamental science processes while trying out their own ideas for unexpected applications. Each of the book s 22 investigations starts with a real case of accidental inspiration that students explore through primary documents or historical accounts. Then it s time for the students to become the innovators. They re tasked to do research, examine data and physical materials, and use their own creativity to design new products or problem-solving applications. The investigations are easy to implement and flexible enough to use in part or as a whole. Students will learn one or more science concepts as they re exposed to background on the unpredictable nature of science. And they ll be intrigued by investigations with titles such as By the Teeth of Your Skin: Shark Skin and Bacteria and From Ship to Staircase: The History of the Slinky." Try this book and see what happens! The result may be more engaged science students and more great ideas about how gecko feet can inspire solutions to everyday problems.

Discovery Engineering in Physical Science: Case Studies for Grades 6-12

Teen & Young Adult

NSTA

Sorry

Vintage Books USA

Sixty Lights

"Photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall..." This is the story of Lucy Strange, a photographer, while the art is in its infancy, in the 1870s, who exists in an extraordinarily heightened state of seeing and imagining. Her tale is told in sixty illuminated parts - using candlelight, flames, lightning, gas-lamps, mirrors, magic lanterns and, most mysteriously, lit faces and bodies. In a contracted, almost modernist form, Sixty Lights tracks Lucy's life from her childhood in Australia, to her stormy adolescence in England and India and finally to her death in London at the age of twenty-three. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished: she is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted, passionate and canny. Sixty Lights plays powerfully with Victorian tropes and texts - orphans, inheritances, Great Expectations - setting them against the technological revolution in seeing that is inspired by photography. Written with astute imagistic precision, the story is deeply layered, fluctuating between past, present and future. This is an impressive UK debut from a prize-winning

Harvill Press

Dreams Of Speaking

Contemporary

HARVILL/SECKER

This is a story that can only be told in a whisper...In the remote outback of North-west Australia, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife Stella raise a curious child, Perdita. Her childhood is far from ordinary; a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education. Emotionally adrift, Perdita develops a friendship with an Aboriginal girl, Mary, with whom she will share a very special bond. She appears content with her unusual family life in this remote corner of the globe until Nicholas Keane is discovered murdered. Through this exquisite story of a young girl's survival against the odds, Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a skill that has already earned her numerous accolades for her previous novels "Dreams of Speaking" and "Sixty Lights".

Harvill Pr

We travel to find ourselves; to run away from ourselves. 
‘A Guide to Berlin’ is the name of a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1925, when he was a young man of 26, living in Berlin. A group of six international travellers, two Italians, two Japanese, an American and an Australian, meet in empty apartments in Berlin to share stories and memories. Each is enthralled in some way by the work of Vladimir Nabokov, and each is finding their way in deep winter in a haunted city. A moment of devastating violence shatters the group, and changes the direction of everyone’s story. Brave and brilliant, A Guide to Berlin traces the strength and fragility of our connections through biographies and secrets.

A Guide to Berlin

In this arresting and richly imaginative collection of twelve stories, Gail Jones explores the role of obsession -- the inescapable loves and torments she calls fetishes -- in the lives of both the famous and the ordinary. Structured around a series of lyrical echoes and repeated images, her stories weave fact and speculation to recreate little-known events in the lives of such figures as Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, and Elvis Presley that may have motivated their art and obsessed them as individuals.In the case of Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx, it is the act of translating Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece, Madame Bovery, that takes over her life, determining even the course of her death. In Ceylon, Anton Chekhov finds a Ceylonese lover he cannot bring back to Russia, but whom he recalls even on his deathbed years later.In other stories, Jones examines how we fetishes these artists: in the story on Walt Whitman, it is not his obsessions that Jones plunges us into; rather, it is his hold as a poet on the lives of others that she envisions. A female Elvis impersonator devotes equal amounts of attention to conspiracy theories about Elvis's death as she does to the role of existentialism; through her we see how Elvis lives on in unlikely fans.In giving life back to those long dead, and to some who never lived at all, Jones does not sentimentalize the moments she imagines. She dissects the intricacies of obsessive desire and of the workings of memory with the dedicated attention of someone who is part psychologist, part conjurer, part biographer, but above all, fascinating.

Fremantle Arts Center Pr

The Death of Noah Glass

Having just returned from a trip to Sicily, the art historian, Noah Glass is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his Sydney apartment block. His grieving adult children Martin and Evie must deal with the shock of their father's death but also with his involvement in a sculpture missing from a museum in Palermo. Jones ponders the concept of a single life and the ways in which it exists in the memory of others. She skilfully explores how books, films and paintings can become repositories of time.

Text Publishing Company

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jones, Gail. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jones, Gail

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jones, Gail. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fetish Lives

Five Bells: A Novel

Discovery Engineering in Physical Science: Case Studies for Grades 6-12

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Sixty Lights

Dreams Of Speaking

Sorry

A Guide to Berlin

Fetish Lives

The Death of Noah Glass