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Books
by Hornets Nest Authors
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Books
published by The Hornets Nest
Other books by Valerie Kirwan
Books by other members of The Hornets Nest
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TAKING A FOOL TO PARADISE
"Two men, unknown to one another, spent long
hours of their childhood confined in closets. Arb
Ginghus, born into wealth, chose to be there while
Henry was helplessly and maliciously locked inside
his grandmother's dollhouse.
When they meet many years later bored, spoilt, narcissistic
Arb becomes intrigued with the predictable life of
Henry Ditassio who has worked as a lowly clerk for
21 years with the same firm and lives alone in an
almost bare house. Arb cruelly guides the descent
of Henry who travels full circle but is always contained
by a single room - from the childhood cupboard and
dollhouse, through the clerks' office with its mysterious
stationary room, to the brothel - "a world of
lurid and lascivious shenanigans" (John Jenkins)
and finally out into a countryside rest home where
the soaring ladders and underground tunnels of Henry's
grand architectural dream contrast with the sterility
of solitary confinement in the rest home's white room.
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Cover
design Andrew Bartlett Creative Design
Cover Photo by Douglas Kirwan |
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Henry Ditassio's journey twists and turns, leading
us to dizzy heights until he mysteriously disappears
inside his architectural nightmare. "TAKING A
FOOL TO PARADISE" is an exploration into a mad
imagination, it is a story of obsession and potential
violence, unsettling at times and darkly amusing.
"
Published by Indra Publishing
Read an extract
of "Taking a Fool to Paradise"
Reviews of Taking a
Fool to Paradise
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book
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Cover
image is "Lilith" by the Hon John Collier |
THE
MOON IS BLOODSHOT
"Dirty Linen" - an extract from The Moon
is Bloodshot was winner of the Mayday Short Story
Awards, 1996.
Rosa works in a geriatric hospital where competitive
story-telling is the only escape. Street characters,
handsome junkies in glittering coats, tattooed girls
with smacked out heads, poets with scars who cannot
stop talking, all become mythic figures woven into
an hallucinatory tapestry.
Published by The Hornet's Nest 1999
Reviews of The Moon
is Bloodshot
Order a copy of the book
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DISEASE OF THE SILKWORM.
Angelina Lar, Mother of Darkness, holds her abused
sons and daughters in The Silk Palace through irrepressible
magnetism.
"This novel has an almost Latin-American quality.
The seductive plot is packed with strange dreams and
stranger actions from the everyday world. It is a
unique blend of the mythical and the sordid, the romantic
and the sinister. Lais, in her innocence, is drawn
into Angelina's theatre of darkness with all its seedy
tricksters. An artist paints mythic images on the
floor of a palatial room in the brothel where Lais
is a prisoner. Lais attempts to communicate with Thomas
Coin, a would-be hero and likeable loser, through
these colourful images and in doing so, adds a breathless
tension to the story. Thomas dreams and plans her
escape but such fantasies lead him to appalling consequences.
"The Disease Of The Silkworm" is a marvelous
invention full of uncomfortable intrigue."
James L Flemming, Tribeca Preview
Published by The Hornet's Nest 2000
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Cover
illustration by Dianne Gameson
after "The Bath" by Jean Leon Genome
Cover design by Doug Kirwan |
Reviews
of Disease of the Silkworm
Read an extract from
the novel
Order a copy of the book
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Cover
design by Andrew Bartlett Creative
Design from a photo used with permission from
the Coo-ee Historical Picture Library
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LOVERS
AND LOSERS OF THE LAST CENTURY
4
Novellas by Valerie Kirwan
"And Then There Were The Good Nights" -
A vigorous sparkling novella about love, friendship
and good times over two decades, 1974 to 1994 - focusing
on a group of friends in Carlton/Fitzroy whose lives
revolve around theatre - "that absurdly enchanting
vicious world beyond the footlights" - and their
explosive relationships.
"In The Cold Morning Light" - a mystery
thriller and a story of elusive love set in Tasmania.
When Aysin returns alone to Charles's isolated house
without Bebe, her lover, she becomes obsessed with
questions about Bebe's fate and Charles's role in
her disappearance. "The dangerous thing about
you," Aysin tells Charles, "is that you
love to be scared even at the expense of your friends."
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"Michael" - a story of illusory love -
portrays a domineering mother through the eyes of
Anna, her son's girlfriend. Domination and alienation
mark the bleak days spent at Michael's mother's house,
days that culminate in Anna's losing Michael as he
withdraws into a new identity which allows her no
place in his life.
"Mrs Wedge's Waterford and a Crate of Champagne"
- Highly Commended in The Tom Howard Short Story Awards
- a black comedy about life without love - is Lou
Wedge's story of coping with her irascible ailing
mother and her own frustrated loneliness, which gives
rise to strange fantasies, erotic and destructive.
Published by Indra
Publishiing 2000
Reviews of Lovers
& Losers
Order a copy of the
book
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WILL TO FALL
Anything can happen when Valium K. plays her random
games called Shale Hemly Whirls. Her friends and acquaintances
are drawn into bizarre adventures.
She visits a mysterious mansion near a country beach
where people behave like spoilt children, wallowing
in their relationships and philosophies. This wealthy
and indulgent atmosphere alternates with the littered
and poverty stricken streets of Melbourne's Fitzroy.
Valuim's boisterous and irrevent ego allows her to
expose the thoughts which we all have but don't dare
voice.
Valerie Kirwan has a suffiently robust sense of self
esteem to survive and tell the story.
Melbourne Times
Published by Penguin Books 1984
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Cover
illustration by Cathy Condell |
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Cover
photo by Garry Larkins |
WANDERING
This collection of short stories is Valerie Kirwan's
second book.
"Wandering", decribed by the Melbourne
Times as "lyrical mind rambling with a sharp
edge of detachment", mirrors the chaos of the
daily world and takes the reader willy nilly on light
hearted adventures.
Kirwan says: "If you can't find ecstasy in stark
ugly reality, you're stuffed". Even so her stories
are "full of excitement, the joie-de-vivre, of
Blaise Cendrars (Millar's hero)....She's of a company
that includes Violette Leduc on one rung and Charles
Bukowski on another."
Kris Hemensley, 1982
Published by Neptune Press 1984
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Pickle to Pie by Glenice Whitting
Pickle
to Pie is colourful, funny, sad, challenging. It evokes
immigrant experience in vivid and compelling detail...
Anne Bartlett, author of 'Knitting'.
Rejected by his mother at birth and raised by his
Grossmutter and Grossvater, Frederick Fritschenburg,
a second generation Australian of German descent,
is dying in hospital. At eighty years of age Frederick
recalls a life torn by two world wars and the Great
Depression-a life of uncertainty and anguish, of disappointment,
human frailties and estranged relationships, where
nothing seems as real as the special childhood bond
that existed between him and his Grossmutter.
Published
by Ilura Press 2007
Click here to read
a review from The Age
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"Grossmutter said that I was squealing like
a tortured mouse when she pulled me from my mother’s
womb. One more squalling bundle in a crib in the dim
parlour. It was Grossmutter who named me Frederick
Joseph Heinrich Frank Fritschenburg. Over my cradle
she sang of great ancestors and past riches. Told
stories of Hänsel and Gretel lost in the forest,
of witches and goblins and Onkel Gustav and Tante
Teresa singing Auf Wiedersehen. Of tears falling on
her piano that last night in Magdeburg"
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Stop Surviving - Live
Your Life!
David W Bottomley & Rita Maulucci
A Workbook For Fulfilling Your Potential
These days, people are so preoccupied with focusing
all their energy on the day-to-day tasks of working,
maintaining relationships, running households and
worrying about their health and money that they are
stressed, anxious and depressed. Living in a fast-paced
society makes it difficult for people to step back
and look at the bigger picture of their happiness.
With exercises and questionnaires to complete throughout,
Stop Surviving Live Your Life provides the
tools and information needed to move beyond living
life in survival mode and to exceed expectations.
This book will encourage readers to find new ways
of living their life and enjoy everyday to the fullest.
Available from all good bookstores RRP $24.95, or
buy direct from the Herald on 1300 656 059 or at www.smhshop.com.au
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| Dark
River
This outstanding collection of poetry, Dark River,
by John Jenkins (Five Islands Press, Australia, 2003),
was listed in The Australian newspaper by Barry Hill
among his top ten poetry collections for 2003:
"John Jenkins’s Dark River is brilliantly
precise about the world out there in nature -most
vividly with the ecology of creeks and wine presses.
As a laconic, vernacular lyricist, Jenkins is as well-versed
in domestic comedy as in Zen. His eighth book; this
is poetry that does not want to be too flash but is
flash, and quietly knows it."
From the launch speech for Dark River, by John
Leonard:
“I saw the manuscript for Dark River some time
ago. When I dipped back in, I couldn’t stop.
Reading poetry that is worth reading is re-reading.
I kept re-reading....
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Dark
River has had the hardest work that John Jenkins has
put into a book so far, because its ambition, its scope,
is remarkably deep and wide. It is a collection of astonishing
reach, in its subjects and forms; its interests and
formal variety, and, just as importantly, marvellous
verbal music. The joy that these lines produce in us
is not just that the play of each consonant and syllable
is so apt, and so much part of the wit and sensuality
of the passage; but that it sounds so easy and we know
it is hard to do. There is a lifetime of craft in that
dance. — John Leonard is a former senior academic
and the editor of Seven Centuries of Poetry in English
(OUP).
From
the review in Australian Book Review, by Mike Ladd:
This new solo collection contains the wit, language
play and urbane imagery we are used to from Jenkins,
as well as emotional depth and an infectious delight
in language... The most ambitious part of Dark River
is ‘The Wine Harvest’ sequence, a group of
seven long poems portraying the Yarra Valley through
the seasons of work in the vineyards.... Reflecting
the poet’s affection for the area, and his firsthand
knowledge of viticulture, his language is by turns muscular,
technical and playful. It’s a great mix of laconic
practicalities, seasonal atmospherics and joyfully precise
language... Dark River (also) contains plenty of urban
material and literary references laced with Jenkins's
characteristic sense of humour. — Mike Ladd is
a poet, radio producer and the presenter of ABC Radio
National’s PoeticA program.
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A
BREAK IN THE WEATHER
A Break in the Weather, the remarkable verse novel
by John Jenkins (Modern Writing Press, 2003) was nominated
for the 20004 annual FAW Christina Stead award for
fiction. It is about the lives and loves of four scientists,
and explores themes of global warming, extreme weather
events and environmental disasters.
Here's what reviewers have said:
Debra Adelaide, reviewing in The Sydney Morning
Herald:
Written in a form of ottava nina, where only the final
couplets rhyme, Jenkins’s verse novel is a compressed
story of love and learning in a contemporary climate:
weather patterns are shifting, and everyone is affected.
Bruce (an Oz sort of everyman) is a mathematician
and scientist who takes time off his work in Hobart.
estimating fishing catches, to fly to Uluru.
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he collides with new cultures and meets a soul mate,
Miko, a student from Japan. Their growing understanding
of the damage inflicted on the environment by fossil
fuels is furthered by professional jealousy, academic
rivalry, and even a bushfire. In an alliance against
the threats, Bruce and Miko shoot across the country,
to the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney and the Blue Mountains,
eventually finding love and, for Bruce, a talent for
verse. As John Ashbery, quoted at the beginning, says:
“All poetry is really about the weather.”
— Debra Adelaide is a novelist, journalist and
reviewer.
From the launch speech by Alex Selenitsch:
"(I)... took it with me as travel reading. On
the way back from Canberra via the NSW coast, Merron
and I stayed at Jervis Bay for a few days, where I
began to read John’s manuscript. Perhaps the
circumstances matched the poem. On the first day,
while walking along the pure white beach at Vincentia,
we watched two destroyers emerge out of the rain in
the bay, swing round and disappear into the mist.
The following day, after a visit to the botanic gardens
in Booderee National Park, we drove back past the
proposed/abandoned site for our new Nuclear Facility,
and back at the beach, watched – and heard, and
felt – a big Navy Chopper hover ten metres above
the bay for about half an hour. As for the poem, I
was entranced, completely taken in. I loved the dialectic
of the formal structure and the speech-like syntax,
the jumps in scale, the mix of voices (documentary
reportage, scientific writing, personal comments and
asides), the connection to other works by the author,
and the connections to the real context of the poem....
The episode of the two weather balloons is an example
of what I mean: I particularly like the equal and
opposite reactions to the balloon debris from the
rural cockie and the urban poet....[The ending gives]...
a traditional image... that of a dancing child, turning,
turning, just as those two destroyers arced around
Jervis bay, just as the chopper’s blades cut
the air above the sea, just as the electrons will
spin about in Little Johnnie’s Reactor wherever
we eventually put it.... [The evolution of a book
is] ... like a conversation, isn’t it? You say
something, I think about it, say something which often
means asking for more and away it goes into new zones,
into the intelligence of the planet.
Alex Selenitsch is a poet, concrete poet, architect,
art theorist, senior academic, furniture designer
and conversationalist.
Read a Barry Dickens
review of A Break in the Weather
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| Secret
Burial
Elise is fifteen when one hot day her mother dies.
If the authorities find out, she and her younger
brother, Jeremy, could be separated and taken into
care. Jeremy is all the family she has. Isaac, a shaggy,
taciturn recluse, is her only confidant.
As she papers over her mother's absences to the busybodies
of the town, Elise's fears for the future become as
oppressive as the relentless heat. As her deception
becomes harder to maintain and tension grows between
her and her brother, Elise is forced to face some
disturbing realities.
But then a young man, a stranger, comes to town,
and everything changes....
Penelope Sell paints a picture of the secrets of
small town life, of long-ago events that reach down
into the present, and a young woman determined to
find her own path. Eloquent and moving, this novel
announces the arrival of a significant new talent.
Published by Harper
CollinsPublishers
Available at any good book store
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Cover
and internal design by Gayna Murphy, Harper Collins
Design Studio |
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Cover
design by
Doug Falconer and Alan T Gray |
The
Mud Brick Adventure
Have you ever thought about building your own mudbrick
home, but always assumed it was only for experts or
highly-skilled amateurs? Andrew Bianco is a self-taught
owner builder who demolishes the myth that you can't
build your own shelter.
The Mud Brick Adventure documents every step in the
building process, showing in clear, detailed photographs
exactly how to clear the house site, read the plan,
place the reo mesh, apply the render, and deal with
tradespeople - and exactly how Andrew did all these
things to build his stylish mudbrick home near Melbourne.
Learn some of his secrets: how he bought a whole kitchen
for $600 ...
The book includes a fold-out copy of Andrew's house
plan with regular references to the plan throughout
the text. Whatever style of home you're contemplating,
this is $20 well spent.
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"Building your own house is as easy as going
on a holiday: buy a ticket and get on the plane -
the rest of the trip just happens". - Andrew
Bianco -
Published by Earth Garden Books
For a full list of Earth
Garden's sustainable building books, visit The
Good Life Book Club Website where you can order
a copy of this book.
You can also buy this book direct from "Friends
of the Earth" Bookshop in Smith Street, Collingwood.
OR Phone 9470 3214 - Mobile: 0418 557 650
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| The
First Computer Mouse
Anna, Dan and Lucy are delighted when Grandad reminisces
about the old computer he worked on when he was young.
But more was happening than even Grandad realised.
Under the floor was another world, whose inhabitants
kept a careful watch on the humans and their computer...
The First Computer Mouse is a beautifully illustrated
book which takes children on a journey exploring how
computers have changed since they were first developed.
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Illustrated
by Deborah Koolen |
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The First Computer Mouse is an excellent introduction
to the study of computers for all primary levels.
"Imagination and enchantment in a quirky technological
tale. Lovely"
Simon Townsend, Host, children's show Wonderworld
"The First Computer Mouse" appeals to the
sense of fantasy in us all. Read and enjoy! - Graeme
Base, Children's book author and illustrator
Published by Museum
Victoria 2001
Order a copy of the
book
Review of The First
Computer Mouse
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©
Site contents Valerie Kirwan unless otherwise stated
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