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The Bath Fugues
''The Bath Fugues'' is a 2009 novel by Australian novelist Brian Castro. Plot summary ''The Bath Fugues'' is a novel of three sections, all interconnecting and modelled on the structure of the Goldberg variations. The first section, "Beckett's Bicycle", tells the story of Jason Redvers, an art forger and writer. The second, "Walter's Brief", concerns Redvers's grandfather Camilo Conceicao, a Portuguese poet. The last, "Sarraute's Surgery", is set in and around Port Douglas in Queensland and features local GP, Judith Sarraute, who had been Redvers's doctor when she was still practising in Sydney. Notes Epigraph: * The Goldberg Variations...are a set of 30 variations for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach. First published in 1741...the work is considered to be one of the most important examples of variation form. It is named after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who may have been the first performer. Wikipedia * It is, in short, music which observes neither end nor beginning, musi ...
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Brian Castro
Brian Albert Castro (born 16 January 1950) is an Australian novelist and essayist. Biography Castro was born in Hong Kong and has lived in Australia since 1961. He was Chair of Creative Writing (2008-2019) at the University of Adelaide and Director of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. His publisher is Giramondo Publishing. Born in Hong Kong of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage, Brian Castro was educated at St Joseph's College Hunter's Hill and the University of Sydney, after which he worked in Australia, France and Hong Kong as a teacher and writer. His first novel ''Birds Of Passage'' (1983) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. ''Double-Wolf'' (1991) won The Age Fiction Prize, the Vance Palmer Prize and the Innovative Writing Prize at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. ''After China'' (1992) again won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. His sixth novel, ''Stepper'' (1997), was awarded the National Book Council Prize for Fiction. ''Shanghai ...
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Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils. It is a Megadiverse countries, megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, with Deserts of Australia, deserts in the centre, tropical Forests of Australia, rainforests in the north-east, and List of mountains in Australia, mountain ranges in the south-east. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south east Asia approximately Early human migrations#Nearby Oceania, 65,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period, last i ...
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English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th ...
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Giramondo Publishing
Giramondo Publishing (Giramondo Publishing Company) is an independent Australian literary small press founded in 1995. It is a publisher of poetry, fiction and non-fiction by Australian and overseas writers, and works in translation from Chinese, German, Spanish, French and Hindi. It also published ''HEAT'' magazine in two series from 1996 to 2012. Giramondo is supported by the Australia Council and Arts NSW. Its works are distributed by NewSouth. History Giramondo was founded by Ivor Indyk and Evelyn Juers, who have worked as its publishers up until the present day. The company’s initial publishing output was in the literary journal ''HEAT'', which gave space to emerging and established authors both from Australia and overseas, often in translation. In 2001, Giramondo moved with Indyk to the University of Newcastle. In 2005, it moved again to join the Writing and Society Research Group at Western Sydney University’s Bankstown campus. It relocated its offices to the univ ...
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Paperback
A paperback (softcover, softback) book is one with a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with adhesive, glue rather than stitch (textile arts), stitches or Staple (fastener), staples. In contrast, hardcover (hardback) books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, leather, paper, or plastic. Inexpensive books bound in paper have existed since at least the 19th century in such forms as pamphlets, yellow-backs, yellowbacks, dime novels, and airport novels. Modern paperbacks can be differentiated from one another by size. In the United States, there are "mass-market paperbacks" and larger, more durable "trade paperbacks". In the United Kingdom, there are A-format, B-format, and the largest C-format sizes. Paperback editions of books are issued when a publisher decides to release a book in a low-cost format. Lower-quality paper, glued (rather than stapled or sewn) bindings, and the lack of a hard cover may contribute to the lower cost of paperbacks. Paperb ...
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The Garden Book
''The Garden Book'' is a 2005 novel by Australian author Brian Castro. Epigraph ::O where is the garden of Being that is only known in Existence ::As the command to be never there, the sentence by which ::Alephs of throbbing fact have been banished into position, ::The clock that dismisses the moment into the turbine of time? ::(W. H. Auden, "For the Time Being") ::Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the areoplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing ...
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Miles Franklin Literary Award
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–1954), who is best known for writing the Australian classic ''My Brilliant Career'' (1901). She bequeathed her estate to fund this award. As of 2016, the award is valued A$60,000. __TOC__ Winners Controversies Author Frank Moorhouse was disqualified from consideration for his novel Grand Days because the story was set in Europe during the 1920s and was not sufficiently Australian. 1995 winner Helen Darville, also known as Helen Demidenko and Helen Dale, won for The Hand that signed the Paper and sparked a debate about authenticity in Australian literature. Darville claimed to be of Ukrainian descent and said it was fiction based on family history. Writer David Marr, who presented the award to her said that revelations about her true ba ...
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Queensland Premier's Literary Awards
The Queensland Premier's Literary Awards were an Australian suite of literary awards inaugurated in 1999 and disestablished in 2012. It was one of the most generous suites of literary awards within Australia, with $225,000 in prize money across 14 categories with prizes up to $25,000 in some categories. The awards upon their establishment incorporated a number of pre-existing awards including the Steele Rudd Award for the best Australian collection of new short fiction and the David Unaipon Award for unpublished Indigenous writing. The awards were established by Peter Beattie, the then Premier of Queensland in 1999 and abolished by Premier Campbell Newman, shortly after winning the 2012 Queensland state election. In response, the Queensland writing community established the Queensland Literary Awards to ensure the Awards continued in some form. The judging panels remained largely the same, and University of Queensland Press committed to continue to publish the winners of the Eme ...
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Victorian Premier's Literary Awards
The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards were created by the Victorian Government with the aim of raising the profile of contemporary creative writing and Australia's publishing industry. As of 2013, it is reportedly Australia's richest literary prize with the top winner receiving 125,000 and category winners 25,000 each. The awards were established in 1985 by John Cain, Premier of Victoria, to mark the centenary of the births of Vance and Nettie Palmer, two of Australia's best-known writers and critics who made significant contributions to Victorian and Australian literary culture. From 1986 till 1997, the awards were presented as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. In 1997 their administration was transferred to the State Library of Victoria. By 2004, the total prize money was 180,000. In 2011, stewardship was taken over by the Wheeler Centre. Winners 2011–present Beginning in 2011, the awards were restructured into 5 categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Drama and ...
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2009 Australian Novels
9 (nine) is the natural number following and preceding . Evolution of the Arabic digit In the beginning, various Indians wrote a digit 9 similar in shape to the modern closing question mark without the bottom dot. The Kshatrapa, Andhra and Gupta started curving the bottom vertical line coming up with a -look-alike. The Nagari continued the bottom stroke to make a circle and enclose the 3-look-alike, in much the same way that the sign @ encircles a lowercase ''a''. As time went on, the enclosing circle became bigger and its line continued beyond the circle downwards, as the 3-look-alike became smaller. Soon, all that was left of the 3-look-alike was a squiggle. The Arabs simply connected that squiggle to the downward stroke at the middle and subsequent European change was purely cosmetic. While the shape of the glyph for the digit 9 has an ascender in most modern typefaces, in typefaces with text figures the character usually has a descender, as, for example, in . The mod ...
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Novels Set In Queensland
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the histori ...
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