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Sydney Bridge Upside Down Text Classics
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Book Synopsis Sydney Bridge Upside Down: Text Classics by : David Ballantyne
Download or read book Sydney Bridge Upside Down: Text Classics written by David Ballantyne and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great, untamed story about childhood, a summer holiday and a sinister tragedy that looms over everything.
Book Synopsis 1788: Text Classics by : Watkin Tench
Download or read book 1788: Text Classics written by Watkin Tench and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1788 Watkin Tench stepped ashore at Botany Bay with the First Fleet. This curious young captain of the marines was an effortless storyteller. His account of the infant colony is the first classic of Australian literature.
Book Synopsis Stiff: Text Classics by : Shane Maloney
Download or read book Stiff: Text Classics written by Shane Maloney and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fiddle at the Pacific Pastoral meat-packing works was a nice little earner for all concerned until Herb Gardiner reported finding a body in number 3 chiller. An accident, of course, but just the excuse a devious political operator might grab to stir up trouble with the unions. Enter Murray Whelan, minder and fixer for the Minister of Industry.
Book Synopsis The Plains: Text Classics by : Gerald Murnane
Download or read book The Plains: Text Classics written by Gerald Murnane and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Book Synopsis Dark Places: Text Classics by : Kate Grenville
Download or read book Dark Places: Text Classics written by Kate Grenville and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark Places, a companion novel to Lilian’s Story, is the tale of a man with a comically grand exterior who believes he has the right, and the duty, to conquer the mocking flesh of any woman. Even his own daughter.
Book Synopsis The Watch Tower: Text Classics by : Elizabeth Harrower
Download or read book The Watch Tower: Text Classics written by Elizabeth Harrower and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘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
Book Synopsis An Iron Rose: Text Classics by : Peter Temple
Download or read book An Iron Rose: Text Classics written by Peter Temple and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic thriller by the five-time winner of the Ned Kelly Award. Introduction by Les Carlyon. When Mac Faraday's best friend is found hanging, the assumption is suicide. But Mac is far from convinced, and he's a man who knows not to accept things at face value. A regular at the local pub, a mainstay of the footy team, Mac is living the quiet life of a country blacksmith - a life connected to a place, connected to its people. But Mac carries a burden of fear and vigilance from his old life. And as this past of secrets, corruption, abuse and murder begins to close in, he must turn to long-forgotten resources to hang on to everything he holds dear, including his own life. Peter Temple is one of Australia's finest writers, the winner of Australia's premier prize for literature in 2010, the Miles Franklin Award, and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for his novel Truth. Born in South Africa, Peter Temple settled in Australia in 1980 and worked as a journalist and teacher before becoming a full-time novelist. Temple has written nine novels and has won the Ned Kelly Award for crime fiction five times. Les Carlyon is the author of Gallipoli, a bestseller in Australia, Britain and New Zealand, The Great War, which was voted book of the year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, and The Master: A Personal Portrait of Bart Cummings. 'Peter Temple has a way with words and the richness of his language alone makes this book rewarding...This is a great book.' Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review 'Temple invests his characters' thought, speech, and deeds with an arresting immediacy and freshness.' Booklist 'A wonderfully controlled piece of writing with some delightfully wry observations...the quality of the prose alone makes the book worth reading.' Opinionator 'A must for thriller seekers.' Who Weekly 'Fast, funny and assured.' Australian Book Review 'The coolest and most elegant of Australian crime writers.' Age 'Temple is a phenomenon.' Sydney Morning Herald 'An Iron Rose has Temple's usual grizzled police veteran as the central character, a despicable and mystifying crime and a support crew of goodies and baddies...Temple's dry Australian vernacular and wit should be required reading for everyone above the age of 16. This edition is introduced by Les Carlyon, a better match for Temple's writing I could not imagine.' Melbourne Weekly
Book Synopsis Wake In Fright: Text Classics by : Kenneth Cook
Download or read book Wake In Fright: Text Classics written by Kenneth Cook and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wake in Fright tells the tale of John Grant's journey into an alcoholic, sexual and spiritual nightmare. It is the original and the greatest outback horror story. Bundanyabba and its citizens will forever haunt its readers. This edition includes an introduction by Peter Temple and an afterword by David Stratton. Wake in Fright was made into a film in 1971, arguably the greatest film ever made in Australia. It starred Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty, and Jack Thompson in his first screen role. Lost for many years, the restored film was re-released to acclaim in 2009. Kenneth Cook was born in Sydney in 1929. Wake in Fright was published in 1961 to high praise in New York and London, and launched Cook's writing career. Cook wrote twenty-one books in all, along with screenplays and scripts for radio and TV. Peter Temple is one of Australia's finest writers. His novel Truth won the 2010 Miles Franklin Award and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Temple has written nine novels and has been published in more than twenty countries. David Stratton is co-presenter of At the Movies on ABC television and film critic for the Australian. He has also served as a President of the International Critics Jury for the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals, written three books and is currently lecturing in Film History at the University of Sydney. textclassics.com.au 'It might be fifty years since the novel appeared yet it retains its freshness, its narrative still compels, and its bleak vision still disquiets...Cook can make us feel the heat, see the endless horizon, hear the sad singing on a little train as it traverses the monotonous plain.' Peter Temple, from the Introduction 'Wake in Fright deserves its status as a modern classic. Cook's prose is masterful and the story is gripping from the first page to the last.' M. J. Hyland 'A classic novel which became a classic film. The Outback without the sentimental bulldust. Australia without the sugar coating.' Robert Drewe 'Wake in Fright is a classic of the ugly side of Menzies' Australia, its brutality, its drunkenness, its anxiety to crush all sensibility. All of this is harrowingly reacorded - the destruction of a young soul fresh to Australia - in Kenneth Cook's remarkable novel.' Thomas Keneally 'A true dark classic of Australian literature.' J. M. Coetzee '...a kind of outback Lord of the Flies...Written entirely from Grant's point of view, the prose is at first straightforward, the landscape and its people evoked simply and vividly. But later, as Grant descends into his own personal hell and finally to the depths of despair, the writing takes on the quality of a delirious dream. The concluding narrative twists will rock both Grant (and the reader) back on their heels.' Crime Time UK ‘A chilling outback horror and an Australian classic.’ Guardian, Top 10 tales from the frontier
Book Synopsis The Women in Black: Text Classics by : Madeleine St John
Download or read book The Women in Black: Text Classics written by Madeleine St John and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, The Women in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow. But it's Sydney in the 1950s, and there's still just enough time left on a hot and frantic day to dream and scheme...By the time the last marked-down frock has been sold, most of the staff of the Ladies' Cocktail section at F. G. Goode's have been launched into slightly different careers. With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence. The Women in Black, introduced by Bruce Beresford, is a great novel, a lost Australian classic. Madeleine St John was born in Sydney in 1941. She studied Arts at Sydney University, where her contemporaries included Bruce Beresford, Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert Hughes. In 1993, St John published her first novel, The Women in Black, the only book she set in Australia. Her third novel, The Essence of the Thing (1997), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Bruce Beresford is one of Australia's best known film and opera directors. His films include The Getting of Wisdom, Driving Miss Daisy and Breaker Morant. textclassics.com.au 'Seductive, hilarious, brilliantly observed, this novel shimmers with wit and tenderness.' Helen Garner 'An exceptional writer. Those of us who knew her at Sydney University back in the late 1950s are still trying to forgive ourselves that we never guessed what she would become.' Clive James 'A knockout - ironic, sharp, alive, and then you're stopped in your tracks by the warmth of her insights.' Joan London 'A little gem...shot through with old-fashioned innocence and sly humour.' Vogue 'A highly sophisticated work, full of funny, sharp and subtle observations...a small masterpiece.' Sunday Times(UK) 'There is something special about...The Women in Black. St John's tone is...a joy: brisk, perfectly managed and, in its disdain for clutter, oddly life-affirming. She casts an airy spell with the deftness of her prose, which moves gracefully, swiftly and with perfect manners...[St John] conjures a Sydney on the cusp of modern promise; a place where her characters can meet the future with a bright face and step out of the past like an old dress, where limits can be lightly shaken off.' Delia Falconer, Australian ‘An excellent read.’ Starts at 60
Book Synopsis A Difficult Young Man: Text Classics by : Martin Boyd
Download or read book A Difficult Young Man: Text Classics written by Martin Boyd and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis They're A Weird Mob: Text Classics by : Nino Culotta
Download or read book They're A Weird Mob: Text Classics written by Nino Culotta and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just off the boat from Italy, Nino Culotta arrives in Sydney. He thought he spoke English but he’s never heard anything like the language these Australians are speaking. They’re a Weird Mob is an hilarious snapshot of the immigrant experience in Menzies-era Australia, by a writer with a brilliant ear for the Australian way with words.
Book Synopsis The Even More Complete Book Of Australian Verse: Text Classics by : John Clarke
Download or read book The Even More Complete Book Of Australian Verse: Text Classics written by John Clarke and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Possibly the most important anthology ever published. The definitive collection featuring key works by such famous Australian poets as Gavin Milton, Arnold Wordsworth, Sylvia Blath, Very Manly Hopkins, R.A.C.V. Milne and Dylan Thompson.
Book Synopsis Careful, He Might Hear You by : Sumner Locke Elliott
Download or read book Careful, He Might Hear You written by Sumner Locke Elliott and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s the Great Depression. Six-year-old PS is an orphan. He lives in Sydney with his Aunt Lila. But all that is about to change. Now his Aunt Vanessa has decided to take proper care of him. Careful, He Might Hear You is one of the most extraordinary portraits of childhood in Australian fiction.
Book Synopsis The Middle Parts Of Fortune by : Frederic Manning
Download or read book The Middle Parts Of Fortune written by Frederic Manning and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed by Eliot, Pound, Lawrence and Hemingway, and based on the author’s own experiences, The Middle Parts of Fortune is a breathtaking account of the Great War and the men who fought it.
Download or read book Amy's Children written by Olga Masters and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abandoned by her feckless husband during the Depression, Amy decides to leave her country town, and her three infant children, and try her luck in the big smoke. Life in wartime Sydney is far from easy, but for Amy there are the hard-won satisfactions of an office job and a house of her own. Until her eldest, Kathleen, appears needing a home while she attends high school. And Amy falls in love with a married man... Enlivened with note-perfect observations of the everyday, wrenching in its portrayal of a young woman struggling to succeed yet often wilfully ignorant of her own children, Olga Masters' second and last novel is a triumph. At its centre is Amy, one of the great characters in Australian literature. This edition comes with an introduction by the novelist Eva Hornung. Olga Masters was born in Pambula, New South Wales, in 1919. She married at twenty-one and had seven children, working part-time as a journalist, leaving her little opportunity to develop her interest in creative writing until she was in her fifties. In the 1970s Masters wrote a radio play and a stage play, and between 1977 and 1981 she won prizes for her short stories. Her debut, the short-story collection The Home Girls, won a National Book Council Award in 1983. She wrote two novels and three collections of stories, the third of which was published posthumously. Masters died in 1986. 'A beautiful little book, written with great gentleness and warmth.' Courier Mail 'Olga Masters writes with freshness and brimming exuberance, and yet control over her material is absolute...Amy's Children is a polished, moving story, one that touches the very roots of being and feeling without the barest hint of cliche.' Age Amy's Children offers a delightfully wicked view of female values and culture.' Bulletin 'Masters' best work...[It] captures in photorealist detail the peeling facades of the inner city during the years when the Depression was supplanted by war...What makes this quiet novel so remarkable? Partly it is the language, as regular and minutely exact as Amy's aunt's hand-sewn buttonholes. But the real magic lies in the way such words are deployed...The sense of loss that pervades this final work is palpable.' Geordie Williamson
Download or read book Selected Poems written by Lesbia Harford and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I love you more Than God loves the world. Little published in her lifetime, Lesbia Harford died young in the late 1920s. Her short lyrical poems—about social justice, revolution, free love, feminism and the experience of women—display a candour and dynamism unusual for her time and place. This essential new selection of her finest work, chosen and introduced by Gerald Murnane, reaffirms Harford’s position as one of Australia’s pre-eminent modern poets. Lesbia Harford was born in 1891. She published few poems in her lifetime. Her work, gathered in posthumous collections and various anthologies, has since been acclaimed for its clear and unadorned style. A congenital heart defect kept her in poor health her whole life and she died in 1927, at the age of thirty-six. 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. ‘Lesbia Harford’s poetry is astonishing.’ Drusilla Modjeska
Book Synopsis Aunts Up the Cross by : Robin Dalton
Download or read book Aunts Up the Cross written by Robin Dalton and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-18 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My great Aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was travelling very slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been travelling fairly fast in the wrong direction. Growing up in the 1930s in a grand old home in Sydney’s bohemian Kings Cross, Robin Dalton experienced a childhood of curiosity and wonder. Raised by a bevy of idiosyncratic aunts and a revolving door of unconventional houseguests, Dalton recalls a time when children had real adventures in a world not easy but perhaps less complicated than today’s. With a gentle warmth and wicked wit, Robin Dalton brings to life all the colour, glamour and charm of Australian society between the wars. Steeped in nostalgia, Aunts Up the Cross is a delightfully funny memoir of family, childhood and an Australia of yesteryear. Robin Dalton was born in Sydney, and lived in London from 1946. She was a television performer, an intelligence agent, a literary agent and a film producer (Madame Souzatska starring Shirley Maclaine; Oscar and Lucinda starring Cate Blanchett), as well as an author. Her 1965 account of her childhood in Kings Cross, Aunts up the Cross remains an Australian classic. The previously unpublished My Relations was released in 2015. She died in 2022 at the age of 101. ‘Hysterically funny.’ Jennifer Byrne ‘A hugely energetic gallop, nicely complemented by Dinah Dryhurst’s spikey, spirited illustrations...[Dalton] lived a technicolour, quite glorious life, which you’ll enjoy being diverted by.’ New Zealand Herald ‘A quirky and hilarious childhood memoir. I haven’t laughed so much in years.’ Tim Flannery, The Books We Loved 2016, Sydney Morning Herald