Books

Call Me, Julian Davies

Call Me, with illustrations by Phil Day, is Julian Davies’ seventh novel. Tangentially related to his previous social satire, Crow Mellow, this is a contemporary Australian story…

Habits of Silence, Stephanie Buckle

Shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award for a short story collection.

A Chink in a Daisy-Chain, Written and illustrated by Phil Day

A creative essay, cum personal reflection, on the relationship between Lewis Carrol’s Alice books, personal identity and argumentative opinion. It is the first in a three-book series Phil plans to write on the embattled nature of individual intellectual and creative autonomy.

Continuing our interest in the book as physical artefact, included in this handsome little book is a colour page and images from a drawing by Phil that recreates the style of Tenniel’s original Alice illustrations.

$12.00 – Paperback book  

Who Said What, Exactly, Hartmann Wallis

Who said what, exactly is an unusual object – a book of playful, punchy, iconoclastic poetry with colourful paintings on its first pages and drawings throughout. Phil Day’s lively, inventive pictures have appeared in other Finlay Lloyd books, but this is a first startling appearance with us for Hartmann Wallis. Or is it?

We recently had an email from an old friend that suggests otherwise:

I was thinking over our conversation re who the hell is this Hartmann Wallis. It hit me that it is possible he isn’t who he is making himself out to be. Can’t be sure about anything, but I’ve discovered that Hartmann left behind an ambiguous note about Australian author, Robert Wallace, who in the late 1980s and into the 1990s had 4 books published by the London publisher Victor Gollancz. These were also published by the New York publisher, St Martin’s Press. Now it seems we can be pretty certain that Robert Wallace was a pseudonym. And I have to ask, where does that leave Hartmann himself? The biography in the front of Who said what, exactly (which includes photographs of this possibly invented writer and his imagined-to-be wife) seems an attempt to obscure the identity of the author just as ‘Robert Wallace’ was back in the 1980s-90s. It’s just that ‘Wallis’ and ‘Wallace’ kept me thinking. Anyway, silly old me, full of doubt re just about everything. Have fun and stay warm, Robin.

$20.00 – Paperback book                                                                                                         

Backlash – Australia’s conflict of values over live exports, Bidda Jones and Julian Davies

This in-depth investigation of the live export trade reveals the backstory of tha powerful industry and the campaign to bring it to an end, including aspects of the political battle that have not been told until now.

Bidda Jones, head of science and strategy at RSPCA Australia, and Julian Davies worked in close collaboration to bring to life the continuing backlash against the 2011 suspension of the trade to Indonesia. The book examines the ethical, economic and social factors that surround this compelling and controversial issue.

$22.00 – Paperback book                                                   

Crow Mellow, Julian Davies

Julian Davies‘ sixth and most unusual novel, is a contemporary social satire closely based on Aldous Huxley’s first novel (from 1921), Crome Yellow. This playful response to another book is startlingly furthered by the text being surrounded by almost 400 drawings by Phil Day, whose hand-made books are collected by many state and university libraries, including The National Library of Australia. In this lively collaboration between words and pictures, the illustrations form a closely related parallel visual text that weave around and interact with the unfolding story. Set in multi-millionaire Mitchell Rimbush’s bush retreat, where artists and writers on the make gather with their wealthy admirers, conversation is the one constant prerequisite.

$28.00 – Paperback book

Six, John Clanchy

Shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Literary Award for the best book of the year.

A collection of richly varied long stories by John Clanchy. These stories reveal the disguised impulses and motivations, the telling switch-points of modern life. With humour, insight and compassion, Clanchy draws us deep within the world of his characters.

Clanchy is best known for his long stories which have won various regional, State and international awards. (He has also written five novels.) The story collection, Vincenzo’s Garden, won seven awards, including the ACT Book of the Year and the Steele Rudd Award (Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards), both in 2006. The novel The Hard Word also won the ACT Book of the Year. International Awards for his stories include The Commonwealth Literature and language Studies Prize (Europe), The Antipodes Prize for Short Fiction, The PEN Air-NZ Prize.

Two crime novels If God Sleeps and And Hope to Die (co-authored with Mark Henshaw) have appeared with Gallimard in France and Rowohlt in Germany – the latter becoming a German bestseller.

$25.00 – Paperback book
ISBN:9780987592934                                                                                                      

The Wild Goose, Mori Ogai

A translation from Meredith McKinney, commissioned by Finlay Lloyd, of this small gem of early modern Japanese literature – a tale of thwarted love by an author influenced by Western writing but still profoundly engaged with Japanese life and its traditions.

Meredith McKinney’s career as a translator includes the classics The Pillow Book and Essays in Idleness and several novels by the great early modern novelist Natsume Soseki, all for Penguin Classics.

Meredith has also edited two books of the letters of Judith Wright, and published a co-translated selection of Judith Wright’s poetry in Japanese.

$20.00 – Paperback book
ISBN: 9780987592927

The Seaglass Spiral, Alan Gould

The Seaglass Spiral is a saga of two families brought together by the accidents of history and love. Based with fidelity on Alan Gould‘s memories, on letters and diaries, and on information from the public record, these glimpses of the past are brought alive and indeed, given an authenticity only possible through the imaginative reinvention of fiction. Each part of this continuity of stories, each life in the greater pattern, seems to speak back and forth across time and remind us that we are in no real sense alone.

$28.00 – Paperback book
ISBN: 9780977567751

Lost Art, Two essays on cultural dysfunction

Art occupies uneasy ground in contemporary society. Although backed by powerful cultural institutions and increasingly embraced by the middle class, it has become more fractured and alienated. These two essays, both discursive and intimately reflective, examine the judgements we make about cultural significance and the values we bring to choosing the art and artists we celebrate and those we overlook or forget. Inherent here are possibilities of loss far more significant and fundamental than the erasing of any number of individual art objects. Today art is only one more brand.

Contributors – Phil Day and Julian Davies

$15.00 – Paperback book
ISBN: 9780977567768

Something in Common, James Grieve

When Professor Blinks and his blended family arrive in Touraine, ‘the Garden of France’, for a sabbatical year, they begin to discover that their lodgings will offer experiences more unforeseen than old-world grandeur and blocked drains. Their landlady Mme de Monzets-Merveylles, will confound their expectations, test their powers of comprehension and, quite possibly, their hold on reality.

James Grieve‘s Something in Common, sophisticated and wry, draws the reader through an entanglement of intercultural misunderstanding, both comic and tragic.

20.00 – Paperback book
ISBN: 9780977567744

The Finlay Lloyd Book About Animals
17 essays, a comic and a poem

Who are they? What do we really know about them? What do our interactions with them tell us about ourselves? The contributors (some with person stories, other with challenging insights or expertise in their field) combine to make this collection a many faceted examination of the other animals and our complex relationship with them.

$25.00 – Paperback book
ISBN: 9780977567737
Out of print

Rooftops, Mandy Ord

Mandy Ord‘s first graphic novel, Rooftops, is a personal and idiosyncratic view of a night in Melbourne. The book opens with Ord’s comic self rushing through the streets of the city to meet friends at a rooftop showing of Ghostbusters. Not only can Ord draw with real but understated graphic power but she has a rare ability to make unremarkable, even awkward, daily events come alive.

$25.00 – Paperback book
ISBN: 9780977567720

Science Minister & the Sea Cow
13 essays on the nature of choice

Choice is full of contradictions. Turn on the television, open a magazine, walk down a city street and the options bombard us. The right to choose is synonymous with our view of freedom, but are we bedevilled by it as much as privileged? And are there some choices we don’t know how to make?

Taking widely differing approaches from the intimate to the discursive, the thirteen contributors to this collection of essays put choice to the test.

$15.00 – Paperback book
ISBN: 9780977567713

When Books Die
15 Essays

Would it matter if no books existed?

Would we be different without them? From the moment we step into a bookshop, to the closing of a books final page, a complex and mysterious process occurs. The future of the book may be equivocal but its continuing power is demonstrated here by fifteen contributors to this collection of essays who examine, play with, and question the role and fate of reading in an electronic age.

$20.00 – Paperback book
ISBN: 9780977567706

FL Smalls

Finlay Lloyd Smalls is a project where we give its authors sixty pages to create a book. Published together in groups, shoulder to shoulder, as an offering of vital writing by Australian authors. In a market where each new book jostles for attention, FL Smalls is a lively antidote to celebrity-driven publishing. Whether producing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or graphic and illustrated stories, Smalls writers vary from first time authors to the well-known, but they join together to create a varied and unusual collection.

The books are small paperbacks
$10 each
$45 for any five

Anxiety Soup

FLSmalls 1 by Tara Mokhtari – Anxiety Soup : A collection of poetry

Anxiety Soup is a vital and intimate collection of poetry. Tara Mokhtari is a Persian-Australian writer based in Melbourne and New York.

The Dark Days of Matty Lang

FLSmalls 2 by Wayne Strudwick – The Dark Days of Matty Lang : A long story

The Dark Days of Matty Lang is a powerful story of friendship, love and betrayal. Wayne Strudwick is a Canberra writer and won the 2013 Voiceless Writing Prize.

Nothing Ventured

FLSmalls 3 by Natalia Zajaz – Nothing Ventured : Comics

A darkly comic collection of cartoons — the drawing is fresh and the stories quiet yet enlivened by playful humour. Natalia Zajaz lives in Katoomba, NSW. She has been making comics for many years but this is her first book.

Bruno Kramzer

FLSmalls 4 by A.S. Patric – Bruno Kramzer : A long story

Bruno Kramzer is an intriguing and disturbing story of evasion and betrayal.

NY

FLSmalls 5 by Many Ord – NY : A graphic story

NY takes its author to Manhattan where she has encounters that surprise and deeply affect her. Mandy Ord is a Melbourne comic writer. Her Rooftops has been reprinted three times by Finlay Lloyd.

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FLSmalls 6 by Paul McDermott – Fragments of the Hole : Odds and ends, bibs and bobs, and little bits of nothing

This wonderfully illustrated collection from Paul McDermott contains a haunting parable about a boy and a goat, and a series of poems that are both fiercely ironic and strangely moving.

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FLSmalls 7 by Carmel Bird – Fair Game : A Tasmanian Memoir

This long essay by Carmel Bird is an engagingly personal, playful and thoughtful examination of the arrival in 1832 in Tasmania of a shipload of women, sent to redress the imbalance of genders in that colonial settlement.

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FLSmalls 8 by Phillip Stamatellis – Growing up Café

This long lively essay from Phillip Stamatellis portrays the ‘biography’ of a café in Goulburn in the 1970s and 80s. We witness the café’s passing parade of motley customers through the eyes of the youngest son of the Greek immigrants who run it.

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FLSmalls 9 by Timothy Morrell – Don’t Leave Home : A Travel Guide

This collection of linked essays from Timothy Morrell explores, with a deft ironic touch, our obsession with travel, in the process taking us to some places that perhaps only the author would want to visit.

Out of print

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FLSmalls 10 by Cassandra Atherton – Trace

This collection of prose poetry from Cassandra Atherton creates a naturally intimate world while, at the same time, fluidly examining complex connections between popular and high culture.

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