Fiction

Risks: New stories from fourteen of Australia’s most exciting fiction writers edited by Brenda Walker

Item: Risks
Author: Don Anderson

by Don Anderson •

April 1996, no. 179

Risks: New stories from fourteen of Australia’s most exciting fiction writers

edited by Brenda Walker

FACP $16.95 pb, 320pp

Fiction

Risks: New stories from fourteen of Australia’s most exciting fiction writers edited by Brenda Walker

by Don Anderson •

April 1996, no. 179

And the fourteen are: Brian Castro, Sara Dowse, Joan London, Gillian Mears, Kim Scott, Brenda Walker, Marele Day, Tom Flood, Gail Jones, Beverley Farmer, David Brooks, John A Scott, Simone Lazaroo, and Carmel Bird, in the order anthologised. In summary: no contribution is less than satisfying, many are gripping, most are distinguished. It’s just that I have a problem with ‘risks’ as the postulated organising principle, though editor Brenda Walker might indeed take comfort in this exchange from Carmel Bird’s contribution, which might serve as epigraph to this review.

Too bad; I’ll risk it. This is a weird sort of writing, I have been told. It isn’t fiction; it isn’t essay; it isn’t poetry. What is it?

Ken wonders about this too. What do you actually think you’re doing here, writing this stuff! he says.

It is a slow search with words for the point where consciousness and understanding intersect with unconsciousness and confusion ...

Don Anderson

Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose, largely of texts from the Americas, Australia, and Europe. For fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular literary columnist in the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was for thirty years a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, where he taught American, Irish, and Australian literature, and literary theory. He was for some years a member of the Advisory Panel of ABR.