The Victoria Principle

InThe Victoria Principle, Michael Farrell extends the humour and narrative drive demonstrated in recent collections such asI Love PoetryandGooglecholiato the short story. The collection begins with a writer character trying to do literary justice to the fear of birds; other stories feature creative activity, such as the conceptual artist who deliberately boils an egg to Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', or the would-be writers who attend a nude retreat in Nova Scotia. There is pathos, too, in a storyteller's relationship with his sister, and in that of a gay doctor with a straight Italian waiter, who is trying to make ends meet while supporting two children with two different women. The stories also revisit classical and popular myths, such as the judgement of Paris, and the life of Andy Gibb. The associations brought into play can be unexpected or absurd, but the process has its own logic: we may think of these fictions as meta-fictions, as 'thought stories' rather than short stories, offering inflections and reflections on queer Catholicism and mental breakdown, amidst the ongoing contradictions and ironies of contemporary Australian life.

Michael Farrell's previous collections published by Giramondo include open sesame, shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Poetry; Cocky's Joy, shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry; I Love Poetry, which won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award; Family Trees; and Googlecholia, longlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. He edited the anthology Ashbery Mode for TinFish, and has published a scholarly monograph with Palgrave Macmillan, Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 17961945.

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