Series: Giramondo Shorts

Evelyn Juers's study of reclusion focuses on Eliza Emily Donnithorne, long considered the model for Charles Dickens' character Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. For most of her life, she lived in isolation in a large house in the inner-Sydney suburb of Newtown. It was said that she had been jilted at the altar and become a recluse, wearing her wedding...

Wild and Woolley - A Publishing Memoir is Wilding's rollicking account of those heady bohemian years in the 1970s and 80s, charting the growth, the experiments, and the development of this innovative small press against a background of social upheaval and cultural change in Australia. It is peppered with irreverent anecdotes and details - their publication of the best-selling manual...

Chi Vu takes the central figure in a traditional Buddhist folktale, a deranged killer who wears his victims' fingers in a garland around his neck, and turns him into a menacing abbatoir worker who carries bloody chunks of meat home to his lodgings in plastic bags. Set in 1980s Melbourne, when the flight of Vietnamese refugees to Australia was at...

Weinberger's essays are like encyclopaedias in miniature, crammed with curious details that make you wonder at the strangeness of creation, and the ability of humans to make it even stranger. Wildlife is a collection which celebrates birds and fish, dogs and flies, ticks and mole-rats, and those two legendary creatures the tiger and the rhinoceros—both highly prized, both now almost...