‘I lost my own father at 12 yrs. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences’.
Ned Kelly was the last and greatest of Australia’s bushrangers, or rural outlaws, and still the country’s most legendary hero. He was captured after the police laid siege to the township of Glenrowan, in up-country Victoria, in June 1880, and hanged in Melbourne later the same year. The followin…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Peter Carey on Alexis de Tocqueville, writing fiction and the inspiration for his forthcoming novel.
‘You might think, who is this, and I might say, this is God, and what are you to do?’
‘We talked about Alison’s blood. We asked her what she thought this mystery could be. Really what we wanted was to be told that everything was OK. There was a look on Alison's face when she asked. I cannot describe it, but it was not a face seeking medical “facts”.’
‘He knew that he did not want it to stop, that he could not escape the grip of this terrible excitement.’
Fiction by Tom Crewe.
‘The stone is cold; touching a leaf is like touching skin.’
A botanist’s assistant longs for her lover in this extract from The Weeds.
‘Our village is built on the ruins of the Crusader castle of Fassove, which was built on the ruins of Mifshata, the Jewish village that had been settled after the destruction of the Second Temple by a group of deviant priests, and which the villagers, as a sort of Jewish-Crusader compromise, called Fassu-ta.’
