An Introduction

A new collection of stories by the award-winning author of An Elegant Young Man and Intimate Antipathies.

The seven stories that make up An Ordinary Ecstasy explore the lives of people whose days are marked by anxiety and tenderness and exaltation: the musician who rides the winding railway up into the mountains at dusk, the retiree walking the streets of his suburb at dawn, the lovers on the balcony of their hotel room watching surfers cut across the waves, the mates who travel north to Byron Bay in search of healing and revenge. In the panoramic reach of his sentences, the exuberance of his language, the flamboyant gestures and obsessions of his characters, Carman captures the scale of emotion as it grows in intensity, often comically, from the smallest and most ordinary things. His stories may be said to embody a principle observed by the novelist Joseph Conrad: ‘There is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only in passing, a glance of wonder.’

'Carman’s prose blends literature and popular culture, punk and poetry, and transforms this rich seam of influence into his own contagious voice with an admirable disregard for the distinctions of high and low art.'

- Sydney Morning Herald  

For a long time Western Sydney has been the political flash-point of the nation, but it has been absent from Australian literature. Luke Carman’s first book of fiction is about to change all that: a collection of monologues and stories which tells it how it is on Australia’s cultural frontier. His young, self-conscious but determined hero navigates his way through the complications of his divorced family, and an often perilous social world, with its Fobs, Lebbos, Greek, Serbs, Grubby Boys and scumbag Aussies, friends and enemies. He loves Whitman and Kerouac, Leonard Cohen and Henry Rollins, is awkward with girls, and has an imaginary friend called Tom. His sensitivity in a tough environment makes life difficult for him – he is anything but an elegant young man. Carman’s style is packed with thought and energy: it captures the voices of the street, and conveys fear and anger, beauty and affection, with a restless intensity. 

Intimate Antipathies is the much anticipated new book by Luke Carman, the award-winning author of the cult classic An Elegant Young Man. '

The essays in this collection follow the writer in his oscillations through anxiety, outrage and ecstasy, and in the process explore the connections between writing and dreaming, writing and mental illness, writing and the complications of family life.

From his famous jeremiad against arts administrators in ‘Getting Square in a Jerking Circle’, through the psychotic attack brought on by the collapse of his marriage, to his surreal account of meeting with Gerald Murnane at a golf club in the remote Victorian village of Goroke, Carman explores the particular challenges faced by writers who grow up in the contested borderlands of the suburbs – always returning to his great obsession, the home on a small mountain in Sydney’s west, where his antipathies with the real world first began to shape his imagination.

'Delicate and powerful at the same time, both in that they are carefully written in style and construction, but at the same time doubled by the raw force of baring the self to the reader’  
- Andrei Vella, Fictiunea 

Un Torpedou numai al lui is a collection of essays on Australian creative writing practice and the connection between writing, mental illness, and fatherhood; it is also a literary travelogue with a particular emphasis on representations of Western Sydney as a region with a unique and simultaneously universal resonance. These English language essays have been translated into Romanian by the Romanian-Australian poet Mihaela Cristescu into a bilingual format. 

 Second City presents the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s western suburbs such a fertile region for writers.

Featuring writing by Zohra Aly, Frances An, Rawah Arja, Luke Carman, Felicity Castagna, Eda Gunaydin, George Haddad, Raaza Jamshed, Yumna Kassab, May Ngo, Aleesha Paz, Sheila Ngoc Pham, Martyn Reyes, Amanda Tink.

Second City is edited by Catriona Menzies-Pike, editor of the Sydney Review of Books and Luke Carman, author of An Elegant Young Man and Intimate Antipathies. It follows The Australian Face, the 2017 collection of critical essays published by the Sydney Review of Books

Essays on the Writing Life

Edited by Catriona Menzies-Pike

'These are not poor-me stories of privileged people feeling sorry for themselves. They are frank explorations of ways of life that have come to seem natural, yet bizarre and oppressive at the same time. They beg the question: is it worth it?'

- Sydney Morning Herald

The writers included in the collection are Sunil Badami, Vanessa Berry, Miro Bilbrough, Luke Carman, Lauren Carroll Harris, Maddee Clark, Justin Clemens, Lisa Fuller, Elena Gomez, Eda Gunaydin, Tom Lee, James Ley, Fiona Kelly McGregor, Oliver Mol, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Ellena Savage, McKenzie Wark, Laura Elizabeth Woollett and Fiona Wright.

Open Secrets is edited by Catriona Menzies-Pike, editor of the Sydney Review of Books. It follows the collections Second City and The Australian Face, both published by the Sydney Review of Books.