Welcome to the Paperback - New Releases - November 2008
Arabesques
Robert Dessaix
One Sunday in Normandy, Robert Dessaix chanced upon the castle where the famous French writer André Gide spent his childhood. Recalling the excitement he felt when he first read Gide as a teenager, Dessaix set off to recapture what it was that once drew him so strongly to this enigmatic figure. From Lisbon to the edge of the Sahara, from Paris to the south of France and Algiers, Dessaix visits the places where the Nobel Prize-winning author, in ways still scandalous to modern sensibilities, lived out his unconventional ideas about love, marriage, sexuality and religion. Part travel memoir and part meditation on such diverse subjects as why we travel, growing old, illicit passions, and the essence of Protestantism.more details...
more Travel...
Best Australian Essays 2008
David Marr (ed.)
It was the year of Wall Street s collapse and Australia s apology, of a film-world tragedy and an art-world scandal. In Best Australian Essays 2008, David Marr has selected great writing from a turbulent time. With eyewitness accounts from crisis zones and film sets, deserts and campaign trails, and tales of failing banks and wounded birds, hitchhiking and footy jumpers, mourning brothers and raising children, music, media, art, love and obscenity, these wonderful essays paint a vivid picture of the year that was. Also Best Australian Stories 2008 and Best Australian Poetry 2008.more details...
more Anthologies, Essays and Journals...
First Australians
Rachel Perkins
A landmark illustrated history of Australia that accompanies the series broadcast on SBS TV. Beginning with Aboriginal travellers landing on Australian shores around 70,000 BC the book and series chronicles the violent clash of culture, religion and ideas at the heart of Australia's history. Drawing on a rich collection of historic documents and images, it brings to life a cast of characters who shaped the interaction between Aboriginals and Europeans including Bennelong, Jandamarra, Truganini and Barak who fought so hard for the lands at Coranderrk.more details...
more Australian Non-fiction...
Lot: The Journalism Of Michael Leunig
Michael Leunig
There are few aspects of existence to which Michael Leunig has not turned his mind, as a bemused and committed member of the human plight. From the fragile ecosystem of the spirit to the brutalisation of the modern world. From the joy of primal epiphanies to the wretchedness of the violence we unwittingly commit against each other and our selves each day. To hypocrisy and despair in the political order. Military madness and the media. The value of the mundane. Emotional mysteries and the night sky. To Humanity's redeeming pathos and our inseparability from the natural world. The lot. No matter how confronting the topic Leunig finds the side you'd forgotten about - or didn't realise was there.more details...
more Humour...
Payback
Margaret Atwood
Payback is an intelligent, wide-ranging book that examines the metaphor of debt and the role it takes in our lives. Rather than debt management or high finance, this is about debt as a very old, central motif in religion and literature and also in the structuring of human societies. Atwood looks at the language of debt in the Old Testament and investigates debt as sin in medieval and Elizabethan literature, before it develops into a plot-driving concept in nineteenth and twentieth century novels. The final essay explores how debt as a metaphor affects our understanding of the environment and death. Topical, enlightening and probing.more details...
more Philosophy, Politics and Current Affairs...
Slap, The
Christos Tsiolkas
At a suburban barbeque a man slaps a child who is not his own and this act has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires. Told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue this is a novel about the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century and a dissection of the growing middle class and it s aspirations and fears. An engrossing contemporary novel about what makes family , loyalty, love, truth and compromise.more details...
more Fiction...
Wanting
Richard Flanagan
Taking the story of John Franklin, governor of Tasmania and explorer of the North West Passage and his determined wife Jane as the connecting point, Flanagan weaves together a richly imagined novel of Mathinna, young Tasmanian Aboriginal girl and Charles Dickens as he prepares to leave his wife and risk his good name to follow his passion. The Franklins adopt Mathinna, seen as the last of a dying race, as an experiment and then abandon her when they believe that savagery has won over civilisation . Franklin goes on disappear into the North West Passage and Dickens becomes involved in a play inspired by Franklin s fate. Flanagan s latest novel explores the idea that life is determined by wanting rather than reason.more details...
more Fiction...