Short Stories

From a clutch of novels including the award-winning Camille’s Bread (1996), Amanda Lohrey has now turned to shorter literary forms, notably two Quarterly Essays (2002, 2006), a novella (Vertigo, 2008) and this new collection of short stories. At the 2009 Sydney Writers’ Festival she publicly confessed her new leaning, arguing the benefits of genres more easily completed by both writer and reader and less likely to produce guilt if cast aside unfinished.

Of Sadhus and Spinners: Australian Encounters with India has been assembled by several of the stalwarts of this particular cultural exchange, all based in Australian or Indian universities. Bruce Bennett and Santosh Sareen have played leading roles over the last two or three decades in establishing Australian Studies in India, most notably through the Indian Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Emmett Stinson has been fiction editor of Adelaide’s Wet Ink magazine since its conception, and came to prominence when his story ‘All Fathers the Father’ won The Age Short Story Competition in 2004. That story is included here in his first collection, as are ‘The Russians are Leaving’ and ‘Great Extinctions in History’, which appeared in the Sleeper’s Almanac in 2007 and 2008, respectively. More recently, Stinson’s story ‘Clinching’ was included in the inaugural edition of Kill Your Darlings. A compendium of his short fiction has thus been in the offing for some time, and it came as little surprise to see his name on the list of writers Affirm Press is showcasing in its interesting new short story series.

Tom Shapcott’s most recent volume collects nine short stories and one novella from 1997 to 2005, the period during which he was the inaugural Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Of his thirty-two volumes, eleven are novels, three are collections of short stories, and eighteen are books of poetry. Tom has received the Patrick White Prize, Senior Fellowships from the Australia Council and an Order of Australia. He has been Director of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, Executive Director of the National Book Council and a member of the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week Committee. Does the man never sleep?

The Perfume River crosses the city of Hue, in the centre of Vietnam. Like tributaries that flow into the main body of water, this anthology of short stories and poetry crosses temporal and geographical boundaries, with Vietnam as the locus point. As editor Catherine Cole says in her introduction, ‘For all Vietnam has defined itself as a voice of inspiration, of homeland, memory and discovery’. The subtitle is not quite accurate, as it implies that all the creative pieces originate within the country, whereas the contributions come from various sources: from Vietnamese nationals living in the motherland, but also from second-generation Vietnamese contemplating home from afar, and from non-Vietnamese who nonetheless have an affinity with the land and its culture. With both insider and outsider perspectives, ‘writing of or about rather than from Vietnam’ might have been a more apt subtitle.

I have lived in Melbourne’s northern suburbs for almost a decade. I am also an aficionado of Australian literature. Thus, I was interested to read Stamping Ground, a collection of writings about my favourite side of the Yarra River.