Death of the Author is a serial killer thriller with a literary twist.In the 1990s, the genre of serial killer fiction is emerging into a serious literary occupation. The world's pulpiest authors converge on a sleepy southern city once described by Salman Rushdie as "the ideal setting for a Stephen King novel or horror film" for the inaugural Festival of Multiple Homicide Fiction--only to be killed, in gruesome homage to their most famous works, by a shadowy figure quickly...

With its currents wearing its sandstone away, Sydney seems like one of the elements, sinking with the tides, pulled by the stars. It moves to the long pulse of the universe as its rhythms drift in and out of phase. It waxes, it wanes; it is lost and rebuilt every year.Equinox tells a story of Sydney over four seasons. The days lengthen and fortune shines, until the earth swings from the sun and into a long winter. The city-dwellers all draw the same curve with their lives:...

Solstice is a novel in verse set over the twenty-four hours of the longest day of the year, in Adelaide, South Australia. It is a story of love and exploration told in sonnet form, one verse for each few minutes of the day. It shows how much can change in a day — the whole world, and at the same time nothing at all.The stage version of Solstice was commissioned by the South Australian Theatre Company in conjunction with Magpie Theatre and was first performed in Ba...

Fortinbrasse is the tragedy of Hamlet’s mirror and foil, the Prince of Norway. It builds on the handful of references Shakespeare gives us in Hamlet with further details from his sources together with my own speculation about the circumstances that eventually lead to Fortinbrasse’s bittersweet arrival at Elsinore at the end of Hamlet.The action is roughly contemporaneous with Hamlet’s, beginning a short time before news of King Hamlet’s death reaches Norw...

Solstice is a novel in verse set over the twenty-four hours of the longest day of the year, in Adelaide, South Australia. It is a story of love and exploration told in sonnet form, one verse for each few minutes of the day.It follows five characters as their paths cross, tangle and separate: two lovers, two strangers, and a wanderer within the city. From the hills to the beaches, from the city towers to the botanic gardens after dark, it seeks out the poetry of everyday li...

Brian Patten is renowned as an accessible and popular poet. Now his love poems, old and new, are collected together in his single volume.Widely acknowledged as one of Europe’s foremost writers, Brian Patten’s love poems earned him recognition far and wide. Truthful and tender, profoundly aware of the possibility of magic and the miraculous, these poems are beautiful, informed and, even at their darkest moments, filled with courage and hope.Alongside old favourites, this edi...

Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats shows him writing at the height of his powers, equally in command of classical forms and of looser, more colloquial measures, and ready to address a wide range of themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a set of poems about the deaths of friends from AIDS. With their unflinching directness, compassion and grace, they are among the most moving statements yet to have been provoked by the disease.

Where do the metal death gliders come from? To the glass-sailors of the five villages the slow birds that inched over the Earth at shoulder height, appearing and vanishing, were a mystery - until young Daniel climbed aboard one of the scarred Missiles and vowed to find out where it wentIan Watson's third short story collection is his best yet: a brilliant array of original and imaginative inventions that plunge the reader into strangely familiar new worlds.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARDS!We lead increasingly time-poor lifestyles, bombarded 24/7 by petrifying news bulletins, internet trolls and endless noises. Where has the joy and relaxation gone from our daily lives? Scribbles in the Margins offers a glorious antidote to that relentless modern-day information churn. It is here to remind you that books and bookshops can still sing to your heart.Warm, heartfelt and witty, here are fifty short essay...

Alongside the names of James Hadley Chase and Erle Stanley Gardner we must now add that of John Hartley Williams - though Mystery in Spiderville is no run-of-the-mill hard-boiled thriller. The d�cor is by Dali, the plot is a mixture of Breton and Burroughs, and the main character - the protean and unkillable Spider Rembrandt - has six toes, sleeps in a grave and dreams of congress with the pert and playful Reedy Buttons.Sucked into the vortex of Spider's philandering mind is a narr...

The upsetting of natural order is our largest tragedy, none more than the death of a child. Thus the bones of this shattering novel. Where Himmelman, his own history of break and mend as perhaps his only aid to understanding, must move from impotence to rage and whatever beyond. But a writer too. With a writer's exclusive powers. To record, to relive, to honour with fullest art and ability the beloved existence of his daughter's however stopped nevertheless complete life.

All Roads Lead to the Sea is a first collection of poetry from a young Bulgarian immigrant poet. Her work had already attracted considerable attention, with a special issue of Poetry New Zealand featuring her poems. Her moody, evocative poems brilliantly convey the rootlessness and restlessness of the immigrant, the mingled sense of loss and wonder in the new land, the nostalgia and the longing, the hopes and the memories. The three parts of the book mirror a passage from...