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'Cracking the Spine is not just a deftly curated overview of the contemporary Australian short story, including pieces by ten of the best practitioners at work today. The auto-critical essays that accompany each work gesture even more widely. Literature, life, landscape, history: the whole gamut of Antipodean experience may be gleaned from its pages. An ideal resource for those interested in Ozlit, Cracking the Spine is also a pure pleasure to read.' - Geordie Williamson

ESCAPE has unexpected tales of contemporary life, comedy, tragedy, mystery, romance, sci fi, dystopian fantasy, a homage to David Foster Wallace and lots more. All served with a good dose of quirky and a fine turn of phrase. If you like your genres with a bit of edge, you'll love this diverse collection of stories from Spineless Wonders. Features award-winning writers such as Ryan O'Neill, Jen Mills, Andy Kissane, Louise Swinn, Julie Chevalier, A.S. Patric and Kim Westwood as well as stories chosen by Sophie Cunningham in the inaugural Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award. Contains illustrations by talented young artist, Paden Hunter.

'Quality short fiction, packed with surprises. Prepare to be transported.' - Marion Halligan

What does it take to make a man?

The short stories of Pierz Newton John move through the full range of masculine experience, with an openness, not afraid to show men at their most lonely, sexual, loving, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes abusive. Tender moments between father and son, first sexual experiences and what men feel and think about women.

* Cover endorsement from acclaimed Australian authors, Chris Womersley and Matthew Condon.

* Pierz Newton-John is a father and former psychotherapist. Published widely in literary journals. Winner of Alan Marshall Short Story Award.

* Cover and evocative sketches by talented artist, Paden Hunter.

Panthers and the Museum of Fire is a novella about walking, memory and writing. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney cafe to return a manuscript by a recently-dead writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator's entire world: life with family and neighbours, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance through a brush with religion, her anorexia, the exercise of that power when she was powerless in every other aspect of her life.

 

'It is not too much of a stretch to compare Jen Craig's work with the otherwise incomparable WG Sebald.' - Debra Adelaide

 

'...the reader is made aware at once that Craig is a writer of great skill.' - Kerryn Goldsworthy

 

Jen Craig's short stories have appeared in various Australian literary magazines. She collaborated with composers of the chamber opera, A Dictionary of Maladies, in Switzerland in 2005.

In Permission to Lie, Julie Chavalier casts a curious eye into many different worlds. Her characters ride the citybound bus route, spend the night in a nudist colony and wait tables. Quirky and beautifully-written, these stories provide insights that ring with integrity and compassion.

'A new voice in Australian fiction, wry, gritty, knowing and true.' - Fiona McGregor

In prose that sparkles with wit, shocks with insight, and beguiles with the air of legend, these eight stories take the reader from post-apocalyptic Tasmania to the tragedy of surrogate pregnancy in the 1950s. Loss of species, the whims of publishers, the question of Islam in regional Australia - these are among the subjects Carmel Bird addresses in her characteristic probing style.

Temper trantrums, doomed relationships, failed businesses, Magellan's crew and house-hunting... This is, at first glance, a quite disparate collection of stories. The settings range from New York, Texas and San Francisco to Sydney, Lismore and Malaysia. The characters vary in age from three years old in 'Rights of Man' to nonagenarians in 'Shady Oaks.' And yet this varied assemblage of work is unified by core themes that speak to us all: the search for one's place in the world, failed attempts to connect with other people and lofty aspirations not acted upon.

'The Last Wilkie's and Other Stories is a quirky collection of short stories that are by turns funny, dark and troubling. Effortless to read, these stories are laced with a quick, sardonic wit that pokes fun at the life narratives we so earnestly attempt to create.' - BOOKS+PUBLISHING

'Jon Steiner's writing manages to articulate last night's forgotten dreams.' - MIKE TOPP, Sasquatch Stories

'Jon Steiner's brilliant and innovative short story collection veers from surreal to hilarious to disturbing to touching and back again. The Last Wilkie's and Other Stories is the kind of adventurous, unpredictable, unclassifiable short story collection that Australian short fiction needs more of.' - RYAN O'NEILL, The Weight of a Human Heart

JON STEINER is a writer and screenwriter who lives in Sydney. An American by birth, he migrated to Australia in 2000. His work has appeared in the UTS Writers' Anthology and two Spineless Wonders productions, Escape and Little Fictions.

This entertaining collection includes a romp of a novella called The Rattler, as well as short stories and micro fictions all set in and around contemporary Melbourne. Sometimes serious, sometimes seriously playful - always written in breathtakingly beautiful prose - these stories uncover the heartbreaking tragedies, slow-burning emotions and serendipity of ordinary lives.

* Cover endorsement from acclaimed Australian authors, Paddy O'Reilly and Ryan O'Neill and award-winning UK author, Vanessa Gebbie.

* The Rattler & other stories are written with the wonder and the wit of Peter Carey and Jonathan Franzen.

* A S Patric is an exciting new Australian talent.

* Cover and evocative sketches by talented artist, Miles Allinson.

This anthology harvests the voices of writers from all over the world, in fictional reflection on what the world to come looks like from where they are writing, in place and in time. Editors Patrick West and Om Prakash Dwivedi have selected stories across a range of genres that will surprise, delight, enthrall and even horrify.

In White Light, a single mother seeks refuge in a religious cult, a young girl hijacks road machinery while her family dresses for church, another family down on their luck finds a gold ingot and the stability of a marriage is threatened by the arrival of a well-travelled ex-lover.

O'Flynn takes us into his local neighbourhood where people, both the ordinary and the bizarre, wrestle with the challenges and puzzles that life throws at them. His characters delight us and his language never ceases to surprise.

In this eclectic collection, O'Flynn, an accomplished poet, turns his hand to linked short stories, micro-fictions and monologues. He displays ventriloquist-like skill, conjuring Shakespeare's Iago, an illiterate inmate called Banjo and a famous Australian poet who finds herself trapped in a toilet cubicle. Monopoly and ping-pong become extended metaphors for the games of everyday life. The result is a heady mix of wordplay, philosophical ruminations and astute social observation.

"O'Flynn's faultless ear for laconic Aussie parlance, his wry ability to turn a story in a moment from comedy to tragedy and back again, his exhilaratingly deft range...all this makes him one of a kind, in my opinion. A hugely enjoyable collection." CATE KENNEDY