David Musgrave

Lambda

A SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 "Literary SF at its best." - The Guardian Whoever the lambdas might be, and wherever they really come from, they're already here among us. Outwardly alien arrivals from a distant sea, the lambdas are genetically human. They slip quietly into low- to middle-income jobs and appear to want nothing more than to be left alone. For Cara Gray, they are first a haunting presence in her otherwise ordinary childhood, then the inscrutable target of her police surveillance work. When a bomb goes off at a school, a nebulous group of lambda extremists claims responsibility for the attack—but how could a vulnerable community of tiny aquatic humans, barely visible in society and seemingly indifferent to their own exploitation, be capable of something so horrific? In Cara's world a toothbrush can be legally alive, a quantum computer has the power to decide who dies, and a government employee made of slime mould protein needs help to relieve his neuroses. As Cara's relationship with the lambdas deepens, she must decide whether to accept her place in a pattern of technology, violence and deceit, or to take action of her own.

Judy Johnson

Martin Langford

Judith Beveridge

An anthology of Australian poetry between the years 1990 and 2015

Contemporary Australian Poetry

David Musgrave's seventh collection of poems is a kind of clearing: poems which open up, sometimes painfully, sometimes joyfully, what it is to be in the world ... this collection encompasses a wide range of emotions, attitudes, forms and styles.

Numb and Number

When it comes to looking back over his life, Archie Fliess has got some understanding to do. So begins a sprawling reflection on his life during the early twentieth century, from the day the fortunes of orphans Archie and brother Reggie changed when they were collected up and taken to be the rightful owners of the property built by their grandfather in country NSW. Along their journey, they are introduced to an odd collection of family and caretakers, who don't always have the best interests of the boys at heart. Archie becomes embroiled in the mystery surrounding his grandfather's life, and as the two stories - Archie's and his grandfather's life - unravel, we see famiiliar themes of disappointment and failed ambition. Glissando - A Melodrama is a tale that travels along many threads: it is an Australian story, told in a playful, philosophical voice in a style reminiscent of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, with shades of Patrick White's Voss. It has a burlesque bravado similar to Steve Toltz's Fraction of the Whole. It's an Australian classic, a satirical romp of epic proportions.

A Melodrama

Glissando

Grotesque Anatomies is a study of Menippean satire in English since the Renaissance. It consists of revisionist, close readings of canonical works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pope’s Dunciad among others, and investigates how identifying them as Menippean satires changes our understanding of them. The initial chapter offers a comprehensive account of the form from antiquity to the present day, identifying its bifurcated development in the shorter form (Seneca-Lucian-Julian) and the longer, more encylopedic form (Varro-Petronius-Boethius), and their subsequent fusion during the Renaissance. It also contains an account of the critical reception of the genre, with the term ‘Menippean satire’ first being used by Justus Lipsius in 1581. Finally, Menippean satire is described as a literary version of the grotesque, and a brief theory of the grotesque in the modern period as ‘radical heterogeneity’ is outlined. This is also the foundation of a new definition of Menippean satire, drawing on previous definitions by Frye, Bakhtin and Kirk, and revising them for the modern period. The following chapters examine iconic works as examples of Menippean satire and of the grotesque. Chapter 2 offers an overview of the nose in Menippean satire and comic literature generally, and reads Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in this context. It also gives an account of metaphor as a ‘grotesque transformation’. Chapter 3 examines the figure of the stomach in Menippean satire and symposiastic literature, and reads Peacock’s Gryll Grange in this context. The link between the stomach as a figure of thinking in comic literature is the basis for an account of symbolic structuring as ‘grotesque association’. Chapter 4 is a close reading of the scatological imagery of Pope’s Dunciad, and how scatology generally tends towards a cyclical metaphysics. It also relates changes in print technology and copyright laws to the reticular scatological structure of the Dunciad. Chapter 5 argues for Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Menippean satire, focusing on the rhetorical figure of the enthymeme as a missing premise, as an example of ‘under-mindedness’ and as an ironic aspect of the fragmentation typical of late Romantic Menippean satires. Chapter 6 examines Urquhart’s eccentric The Jewel as a satire on the referential function of language, reading it in the context of projections for a universal language from this period. The final chapter identifies some key works by Derrida and Barthes as Menippean satires, noting the resurgence of the form in some postmodern and deconstructive writing.

David Musgrave

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