Lucy glared at me from a young woman’s bicep, her mouth picked out in a crabby zig-zag of dark-blue ink on pale skin. Yes, that Lucy, the-doctor-is-in, Peanuts Lucy. On the woman’s right arm Pig Pen hovered in a cloud of inky blue grime among a gallery of other stick-and-pokes. The girl with the Lucy…
Announcing the Winner of the 2017 Italian Prose in Translation Award!Posted on October 10, 2017 by rcldaum October 7, 2017—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is delighted to announce the winner of the 2016 Italian Prose in Translation Award! The award was officially announced during ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA40: Reflections/Refractions, held this year at the…
I ate a Portuguese tart at the farmers market. The custard was cold, had the texture of craft paste and tasted like water-based sealant. The pie man stepped from foot to foot behind the pie counter: he wanted to be somewhere else. A girl busked a violin with a tinsel-covered case on the ground in…
You might have seen the mural in La Trobe Street – a stretch of wall near Swanston Street painted with sad grey battery hens wearing fast food boxes over their heads: a sly shot at the burger chains, the submarine sandwich sellers and the peri peri chicken grillers. A hashtag in one corner, #fixfastfood, clues you in…
Juliet Sulejmani | April 01, 2016 “Fiction books are my soul food, junk food and brain food all in one. More, they’re my oxygen – I need them to live.” So says Baz about why he r… Source: Untitled Book Club
SOME DAYS it rained, that summer of Saucony. I took long walks on the clifftop paths. The grey-green sea broke against the rocks in rolling swells and sent long, foamy washes into the coves, and the beaches were closed for days at a time by dangerous currents and sudden blooms of stormwater. That didn’t stop the…
Darren, in a neat shirt and slacks, with an ID lanyard around his neck, a bright red chevron that signifies his membership of the cardiometrical brotherhood – they are still mostly men – Darren will pass a plastic-covered sensor over your upper left chest, where your heart is supposed, in the sense of thought, to…
Ground Zero for Melbourne’s Nutella donut boom was a quiet northern suburbs street that runs off Sydney Road opposite Fawkner Cemetery. Among the brick veneer and weatherboard bungalows built by migrants from Italy and Greece in the 1960s and 1970s is a row of shops, empty-looking except for the milk bar in the middle, Jimmy’s…
The people were queuing up to board, some through the front door, some through the rear, according to which line the flight attendant checking our boarding passes had assigned us: in theory the two queues would never meet, dissolving somewhere in the middle of the aircraft: “Row 19 – board through the rear door, please.…
The knife came in a special black cardboard box with the blade wrapped in newspaper and slipped into a protective vinyl scabbard. The steel was clean and bright, stippled along the spine as if it had been beaten with a small hammer, and engraved with Japanese calligraphy. The cutting edge bore a watery swirl, like…
Matt Holden 