AustLit

'In a recent interview with Alice Allan, James Jiang laments the ‘prize culture’ that permeates Australian literature, arguing that readers who avoid ‘bad’ books may be left with a superficial sense of what’s ‘good’.¹ At present, what’s considered worth reading—by mass audiences, at least—is limited to a select handful of gold-stickered texts, deemed palatable by institutional marketing, with snappy quotes on back covers. A triumph, they say. Dazzling. A fresh new voice! In the age of social media, readers are eager to read the right books and have the right takes, which makes reaching for a prize-winning text a no-brainer. To be sure, many of these texts are well worth reading—take Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear (2021) and Shastra Deo’s The Agonist (2017), for example. The problem isn’t that judges have bad taste. Rather, as Jiang highlights, selecting all your reading material in this manner takes the element of adventure out of reading. For me, reading only prize-winning books is a form of algorithmic reading, which prevents us from thinking critically about literature, and potentially limits the future of #ozlit itself.' (Introduction)

'What is a short short story? More specifically, how short is it (or how long)? The most famous tiny example is attributed to Ernest Hemingway: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Whether he wrote this or not, it represents the gold standard in suggesting much in little. Like poetry, microstories or flash fictions allow no formal wobbling as authors tread a perilous tightrope between banality and inspired ingenuity.' (Introduction)