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- Published 20250204
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-04-3
- Extent: 196 pp
- Paperback, ebook. PDF
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About the author
Toby Fitch
Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of eight...
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Sissys and bros
Fiction‘Sydneysiders woke up to a red dawn this morning due to an eerie once-in-a-century weather phenomenon.’ This was straight after school, before my shift. Channel 9’s Peter Overton was blaring from the TV. My five sisters and two brothers yelled about Mumma hogging the remote. Overton’s robot voice followed me into my room. I tugged off my Holy Fire High School blazer. Our emblem: Bible beneath a burning bush. Our motto: Souls Alight for the Lord and Learning. Fumbled through the dirty laundry basket for my dress-like work shirt that stunk of rancid onion. Our logo: a pepperoni pizza wearing a fedora and holding a Tommy gun. Our motto: Happy Mafias Pizza: Real Italians Leave the Gun and Take the Cannoli.
Shelf life
Non-fictionEarly in his career, Charles Dickens notably underestimated the reputational risk of library-shelf browsing when he invited the critic George Henry Lewes home for tea. Over steaming cups, Lewes eyed naff triple-decker novels and bland travel books, ‘all obviously the presentation copies from authors and publishers’. He recalled the experience in a waspish elegy published shortly after Dickens’ death: ‘A man’s library expresses much of his hidden life, I did not expect to find a bookworm, nor even a student, in the marvellous “Boz” but nevertheless this collection of books was a shock.’
Safe as houses
IntroductionSometimes, if I can’t get to sleep, I imagine I’m back in the house where I grew up... I like to go back there in my mind’s eye, conjuring the slightly crooked hallway, the doors that never neatly fit their frames, the tiny kitchen with its overwhelmingly wheaten spectrum of 1980s browns. Like handwriting on old foolscap, the more specific details have long faded with time, but the feeling remains: that ineffable sense of calm and familiarity that I associate with being home.
