After 40 years in Australia, Ant nio Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls "Shanghai Dancing," Ant nio seeks to understand the source of his condition in his family's wanderings. Reversing his parents' own migration, Ant nio heads back to their native Shanghai, where his world begins to fragment as his ancestry starts to flood into his present, and emissaries of glittering pre-war China, evangelical Liverpool and seventeenth-century Portugal merge into contemporary backdrops across Asia, Europe and Australia. A "fictional autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation that combines photographs and written images in the style of W.G. Sebald. The Age has described the book as "an extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene... told in Castro's characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay." The winner of some of Australia's top literary prizes, Shanghai Dancing has been praised by its judges as "a work of major significance that] challenges our expectations of storytelling... It is impressive as history, as fiction, as a book which stretches the literary form and which speaks to the universality of the human experience." Shanghai Dancing marks the U.S. debut of a major Australian literary figure.

Shanghai Dancing

Literature & Fiction

Brian Castro

Literary

Giramondo Publishing

burning-in

juchau-mirielle

Stepping Out

Catherine Rey

Look Who's Morphing by Tom Cho 2009

Tom Cho

Short Stories & Anthologies

First Light

Kate Fagan

Poetry

Anguli Ma

Politics & Social Sciences

Vu, Chi

Social Sciences

Is it possible to fall in love with a correspondent based entirely on a fascination with his or her handwriting, with a map of the country they live in, with the syllables of their name? What about, then, a fictional character, in a book about a country one has never, and will never, visit?\nInland is a compact story—or group of stories, each nested within another—nonetheless opening onto a seemingly endless fractal geography, where the interior of Australia, the Midwestern prairie, and the Hungarian Alföld merge, imitate, and enfold one another in the mind of a man sitting alone in a room full of books. Perhaps the greatest novel by Gerald Murnane, Australia’s reply to Proust and Calvino, and a Nobel favorite for several years running, Inland shows that one can as easily be an exile in one’s own interior as out in the wide world, and as easily feel the loss of people one has only imagined as those who have shared our lives in the flesh.

Inland

Murnane, Gerald

Ephemeral Waters is a book-length poem, told by an Australian traveller, which follows the once-great Colorado River from its source in the central Rocky Mountains, through the American Southwest and the Sonoran Desert of Mexico, to its historical delta in the Gulf of California. It incorporates fragments drawn from geological surveys, archival documents, films, interviews and personal conversations: the voices woven through it range from John Wesley Powell, the leader of the first party to raft through the Grand Canyon, to movie star John Wayne and contemporary park rangers. The result is a polyphonic poem, both local and global in scope, embodying an Australian preoccupation with water in taking the over-taxed Colorado as a prophetic example of a river system in crisis.

Ephemeral Waters

Kate Middleton

HEAT Series 3 Number 2

Helen Oyeyemi

Michael Farrell

Pip Adam

Samuel Wagan Watson

Luke Carman

Ren Arcamone

In the Roar of the Machine

Zheng Xiaoqiong

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