The Glory Garage: Growing Up Lebanese Muslim In Australia by Nadia Jamal. A fresh look at gender identity. Author Christos Tsiolkas questions, mocks and helps society fight the status quo, writes RAKA SARKHEL I first found Australian author Christos Tsiolkas at a time when I had just relocated to Sydney, along with my Indian baggage, and was still struggling to make a home in this huge multicultural patchwork.
I picked up a copy of his Merciless Gods and chuckled at the relevance and resonance of the title in my life as the merciless gods above (pun intended) played cosmic chess with us as their pawns and chose our destinies and dilemmas for us. A stirring of cultures: The contest for place belonging and iden. Swallow the Air - Reading Australia. This novel by Tara June Winch is a narrative of a broken family, of running from unbearable pain, and of the quest to belong.
It would be easy, especially for non-Aboriginal readers, to assume that Winch’s protagonist is searching most for her racial identity. But when May Gibson’s mother dies unexpectedly beneath the jacaranda tree in the backyard, and her small family disintegrates around her, May’s search is not for her Aboriginality. McSweeney's Issue 41 - The McSweeney's Store. Our latest lightning-lashed hardcover is a head-exploder from end to end—on the fiction front there’s Thomas McGuane and Aimee Bender, Deb Olin Unferth and Ryan Boudinot, ill-fated river trips and lovelorn robots and Hollywood super-agents bent on revenge; on the nonfiction side there are amazing accounts of upheaval and rebirth in Tehran and Mississippi and Mexico City and Riverside, California.
There is full-color art all the way through, too, and a special section of Australian Aboriginal fiction that is so good you won’t believe it. This one is overstuffed in the best summer blockbuster fashion—let it into your life! Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye. I’m not sure how well known the American publishing house McSweeney’s is in Australia, although I expect that at least some readers will be familiar with editor Dave Eggers’ best-selling memoir from 2000, A Heartbeaking Work of Staggering Genius or his new novel A Hologram for the King.
Certainly here in the States the literary journal McSweeney’s (or to give it its full if seldom used title Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern) is well known and well respected for publishing fine fiction and non-fiction, often packaged in unusual formats: paperback one issue, hardback another, a third in a cigar box with inserts, another with an Icelandic mini-tabloid magazine bound in.
In short, a literary journal that takes risks and comes with the unexpected. McSweeney’s 41 was published last month and the unexpected this time takes the form of a special section entitled Terra Australis: four stories from Australian Aboriginal writers, selected by Chris Flynn. A journey of Indigenous identity. 67198 00003062 01 Muslim Communities Searching for Identity%2c Muslims in Australia.