The Australian Ugliness: Text Classics

The Australian Ugliness: Text Classics PDF Author: Robin Boyd
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1921921994
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Brilliant, witty, scathing, The Australian Ugliness is the classic postwar account of Australian society, how we live in the environments we create, and the consequences of our failure to think about how we live.

The Australian Ugliness: Text Classics

The Australian Ugliness: Text Classics PDF Author: Robin Boyd
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1921921994
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Brilliant, witty, scathing, The Australian Ugliness is the classic postwar account of Australian society, how we live in the environments we create, and the consequences of our failure to think about how we live.

The Australian ugliness [by] Robin Boyd

The Australian ugliness [by] Robin Boyd PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description


Our Magic Hour

Our Magic Hour PDF Author: Jennifer Down
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1922253472
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Audrey, Katy and Adam have been friends since high school—a decade of sneaky cigarettes, drunken misadventures on Melbourne backstreets, heart-to-hearts, in-jokes. But now Katy has gone. And without her, Audrey is thrown off balance: everything she thought she knew, everything she believed was true, is bent out of shape. Audrey’s family—her neurotic mother, her wayward teenage brother, her uptight suburban sister—are likely to fall apart. Her boyfriend, Nick, tries to hold their relationship together. And Audrey, caught in the middle, needs to find a reason to keep going when everything around her suddenly seems wrong. Evocative and exquisitely written, Our Magic Hour is a story of love, loss and discovery. Jennifer Down’s remarkable debut novel captures that moment when being young and invincible gives way to being open and vulnerable, when one terrible act changes a life forever. Jennifer Down is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in publications including the Age, Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review and Overland. She is one of Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year, 2017. Our Magic Hour, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. She lives in Melbourne. ‘Down’s evocation of Audrey’s grief is astute, perceptive and always convincing...It’s compelling writing.’ Australian ‘Intimate, raw and occasionally heartbreaking...I loved this book. Our Magic Hour is beautiful, gut-wrenching fiction and I cannot recommend it highly enough.’ Readings ‘Down has perfectly captured the vulnerability of youth...An incredibly intimate and tender novel about friendship, family and the transformative power of grief...It is easily one of the best Australian debuts I’ve read in a long time.’ Lip Mag 'Down’s novel is a story about very small things, that all add up to very big things about grief and friendship, love and death...Down has an impressive feel for the drama of the ordinary.’ Age/Sydney Morning Herald ‘Down has a reserved but beautiful prose...In its maturity and elegance, Our Magic Hour is a surprising and captivating debut novel. I have no doubt that Down will produce more quality writing in the future.’ Farrago ‘Down’s preoccupations are those of a young adult grappling with heavy issues, and she does so admirably...Our Magic Hour takes place in a lively, vivid Melbourne cityscape.’ Otago Daily Times ‘Striking, breathlessly written...Down’s clear and confident voice can play originally with language...An eloquent debut.’ WA Today ‘Down’s supple social realism has a vitality and energy to it...I’m sure that Down will be a fixture in the Australian lit scene for years to come.’ Lifted Brow ‘An impressive and emotionally sophisticated novel.’ Australian Book Review ‘Its depictions of the characters’ close friendships, and the personalised map of Melbourne it draws were so vivid and so true that I found myself almost longing for the same, despite the sadness at the heart of the book.’ Readings, Our Favourite Books of 2016 (so far) ‘Subtle and vividly observed, Our Magic Hour is a chronicle of early adulthood, with all its violent unions and passionate friendships...Down’s work [is] universally important.’ Overland ‘Down’s depiction of modern Melbourne is so familiar and evocative that I felt like I’d bumped into her characters at the cafe just the day before. For a book so infused with grief and longing, the sheer amount of love and depth of feeling in the novel made me yearn for everything and nothing all at once, and has stayed with me throughout the year.’ 2016 Staff Picks, Kill Your Darlings ‘If Helen Garner turned her razor-sharp eye to a new generation, Our Magic Hour might be the result. Down unravels the self-obsession and shortsightedness of youth with insight and affection, and turns the grit of modern twenty-something life—breakups, breakdowns, new jobs and new towns—into something profound, beautiful and hopeful.’ Junkee ‘Down writes equally of significant moments and unremarkable days with sparing beauty. Particularly adept at depiction of place, Down made me wonder if I hadn’t sat across from Audrey on the train to Redfern, bumped elbows with her at a bar in Bondi. Down is the kind of writer that you’ll be lucky to get on at the ground floor with, she is only going up.’ Concrete Playground ‘A raw novel about growing up in a world that never seems to make any sense...this novel manages to neatly capture that universal malaise felt by terrified millennials all over the world.’ Vice ‘A masterclass in elegant understatement...A very fine novel indeed—compassionate, clear-sighted and lovely.’ A Life in Books ‘Down’s prose is sharp and intimate, the characters flawed and achingly familiar. For a book about mourning, it’s not overly sentimental or indulgent. Instead, the characters’ grief is ugly and bewildering. Our Magic Hour is a compelling, authentic portrayal of loss, dislocation and the unsteadiness of young adult life.’ Good Reading

Outbreak of Love

Outbreak of Love PDF Author: Martin Boyd
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Australian fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The story of a marriage under threat, it is a comedy of manners which carries an undercurrent of unease, reflecting the contrasting issues of approaching war and the personal conflict between the head and the heart.

Artificial Islands

Artificial Islands PDF Author: Owen Hatherley
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 191442087X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Should Britain form a new union with its old 'Dominions' in Canada, Australia and New Zealand? Are they really our closest allies and relations? And is there any reason why they should want to unite again with us? Great Britain has just left one Union, after years of bitter argument and divisive posturing. But what if the island's future lies in another Union altogether, with some of its former colonial “kith and kin” across the seas? Why be in a Union with your immediate neighbours, when you could instead be in a trans-oceanic super-state with our old friends in Canada, Australia and New Zealand? Welcome to the strange world of the 'CANZUK Union', the name for a quixotic but apparently serious plan to reunify the white-majority 'Dominions' of the British Empire under the flag of low taxes, strong borders and climate change denialism. Artificial Islands tests the idea that Britain's natural allies and closest relations are in these three countries in North America and the Antipodes, through a good look at the histories, townscapes and spaces of several cities across the settler zones of the British Empire. These are some of the most purely artificial and modern landscapes in the world, British-designed cities that were built with extreme rapidity in forcibly seized territories on the other side of the world from Britain. Were these places really no more than just a reproduction of British Values planted in unlikely corners of the globe? How are people in Auckland, Melbourne, Montreal, Ottawa and Wellington re-imagining their own history, or their countries' role in the British Empire and their complicity in its crimes? And do they have any interest in a union with us?

After The Australian Ugliness

After The Australian Ugliness PDF Author: NAOMI ET AL. STEAD
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781760761899
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


A Difficult Young Man: Text Classics

A Difficult Young Man: Text Classics PDF Author: Martin Boyd
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1921921757
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Handsome, proud, reprehensible, misunderstood. Dominic Langton is the dark heart of A Difficult Young Man. His brother Guy can scarcely understand where he fits into the pattern of things or what he might do next. Martin Boyd’s much loved novel is an elegant, witty and compelling family tale about the contradictions of growing up.

The Plains: Text Classics

The Plains: Text Classics PDF Author: Gerald Murnane
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1921921870
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Winner of the Patrick White Literary Award, 1999. Introduction by Wayne Macauley. There is no book in Australian literature like The Plains. In the two decades since its first publication, this haunting novel has earned its status as a classic. A nameless young man arrives on the plains and begins to document the strange and rich culture of the plains families. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, ‘a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself’. Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has been a primary teacher, an editor and a university lecturer. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), was followed by ten other works of fiction, including The Plains and most recently Border Districts. In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He lives in western Victoria. Wayne Macauley is the author of three novels, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe (2004), Caravan Story (2007) and The Cook (2011), and the short fiction collection Other Stories (2010). He lives in Melbourne. ‘Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced.’ Peter Craven ‘A distinguished, distinctive, unforgettable novel.’ Shirley Hazzard ‘Gerald Murnane is unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today and The Plains is a fascinating and rewarding book...The writing is extraordinarily good, spare, austere, strong, often oddly moving.’ Australian ‘A piece of imaginative writing so remarkably sustained that it is a subject for meditation rather than a mere reading...In the depths and surfaces of this extraordinary fable you will see your inner self eerily reflected again and again.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘The Plains has that peculiar singularity that can make literature great.’ Ed Wright, Australian, Best Books of 2015 ‘Murnane touches on foibles and philosophy, plays with the makings of a fable or allegory, and all the while toys with tone, moving easily from earnest to deadpan to lightly ironic, a meld of Buster Keaton, the Kafka of the short stories, and Swift in A Modest Proposal...A provocative, delightful, diverting must-reread.’ STARRED Review, Kirkus Reviews ‘Known for its sharp yet defamiliarizing take on the landscape and an aesthetic of purity historically associated with it, The Plains is uniformly described as a masterpiece of Australian literature. Look closer, though, and it's a haunting nineteenth-century novel of colonial violence captured inside the machine's test-pattern image—a distant, unassuming house on the plains.’ BOMB

The Watch Tower: Text Classics

The Watch Tower: Text Classics PDF Author: Elizabeth Harrower
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1921921986
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
‘Harrower's greatest novel [is] The Watch Tower (1966), the bitter story of two sisters, Laura and Clare, who lose their parents and fall under the sway of Felix Shaw, an abusive and controlling drunk...[It is] her masterpiece.’ James Wood, New Yorker After Laura and Clare are abandoned by their mother, Felix is there to help, even to marry Laura if she will have him. Little by little the two sisters grow complicit with his obsessions, his cruelty, his need to control. Set in the leafy northern suburbs of Sydney during the 1940s, The Watch Tower is a novel of relentless and acute psychological power. Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928 and moved to London in 1951. She travelled extensively and began to write fiction. Her first novel Down in the City was published in 1957, and was followed by The Long Prospect a year later. In 1959 she returned to Sydney where she began working for the ABC and as a book reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1960 she published The Catherine Wheel, the story of an Australian law student in London, her only novel not set in Sydney. The Watch Tower appeared in 1966. No further novels were published until May 2014 when Harrower's 'lost' novel, In Certain Circles, was released. Her work is austere, intelligent, ruthless in its perceptions about men and women. She was admired by many of her contemporaries, including Patrick White and Christina Stead, and is without doubt among the most important writers of the postwar period in Australia. Elizabeth Harrower died in Sydney on 7 July 2020 at the age of ninety-two. 'Haunting and delicate.' Kirkus Reviews 'This is a harrowing novel, relentless in its depiction of marital enslavement, spiritual self-destruction and the exploited condition of women in a masculinist society...It is a brilliant achievement.' Washington Post 'Haunting...Harrower captures brilliantly the struggle to retain a self.' Guardian ‘Each of Harrower’s four novels is concerned with entrapment of one sort or another, through family or youth or love. But The Watch Tower, her last novel, is almost like a distillation in its vision of the forces of good and evil. Something runs clear and strong through this wonderful, painful novel, the dark and the light. The victim and the survivor. Suffering and joy. The knowledge of both. Reality.’ Joan London, Lit Hub 'Elizabeth Harrower's thrilling 1966 novel The Watch Tower comes rampaging back from decades of disgraceful neglect: a wartime Sydney story of two abandoned sisters and the arrival in their lives of Felix, one of literature's most ferociously realised nasty pieces of work.' Helen Garner, Australian 'A superb psychological novel that will creep into your bones.' Michelle de Kretser, The Monthly 'I read The Watch Tower with a mixture of fascination and horror. It was impossible to put down...Her acute psychological assessments are made from gestures, language and glances and she is brilliant on power, isolation and class.' Ramona Koval, Australian ‘To create a monster as continually credible, comic and nauseating as Felix is a feat of a very high order. But to control that creation, as Miss Harrower does, so that Clare remains the centre of interest is an achievement even more rare. The Watch Tower is a triumph of art over virtuosity...a dense, profoundly moral novel of our time.’ H.G. Kippax, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 1966 ‘As gripping and terrifying as any horror story...An astonishing book.’ Guardian

Gould's Book of Fish

Gould's Book of Fish PDF Author: Richard Flanagan
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802191991
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Winner of the Commonwealth Prize New York Times Book Review—Notable Fiction 2002 Entertainment Weekly—Best Fiction of 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Review—Best of the Best 2002 Washington Post Book World—Raves 2002 Chicago Tribune—Favorite Books of 2002 Christian Science Monitor—Best Books 2002 Publishers Weekly—Best Books of 2002 The Cleveland Plain Dealer—Year’s Best Books Minneapolis Star Tribune—Standout Books of 2002 Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled. Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould’s Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.