Sleepers Almanac No.7
Edited by Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner
The cant of a bitter, jealous writer: I can’t warm to a lot of contemporary fiction. Much of it cleaves to a fairly beige emotional spectrum. At one end, there is earnest navel-gazing, vignettes of brief encounters camping at the beach, pieces conceived in the belief that the more elliptically and abstrusely a writer treats a subject, the better (“She came in and lighted a cigarette. I got up and coughed. She turned away.”). At the other, you have showy pomo antics of formidable artifice and intellectual fortitude but lacking a resonance beyond that, nothing to set off the chest-tremors or gut-quivers that make the best fiction work. Oh, and humour is proscribed: don’t even think about cracking jokes, unless they’re kind of dry, world-weary ones. Pieces conform to the university creative-writing template, a thousand flowers blooming from the pappi of Raymond Carver. It’s difficult – not rare, nor impossible, but difficult – to come across a writer who, without hype, without knowing the right people, without going through the motions to appease a loyal cadre of fellow writers, is doing something unique, whose prose or poetry verily sparkles on the page and compels you to devour it whole.
Thankfully, the work in the seventh edition of the Sleepers Almanac eschews dull introspection in favour of assays at something original and universal, of an outlook not tinctured with angst and po-faced sharehouse scenes, clandestine suburban infidelities or gauche rites of passage. The Sleepers philosophy is apparent in their published novels to date: for example, the unpunctuated, hyperkinetic screed of Miles Vertigan’s Life Kills and the very successful books of Steven Amsterdam. The Almanac – available in both print and digital formats – has become an institution in the space of seven years, nurturing a who’s who of emerging Australian fiction.
These works are guided by a mortal urgency, themes of mortality and efforts to remain vital. ‘Gandhi Goes to Hell,’ the punchline-riddled first-person narration by Brad Bryant, buries one shaggy-dog tale within another, a affably rambling account of a dead uncle and a joke in which Gandhi arrives in Hell for a brief stay due to processing delays. Sam Cooney’s ‘Sucker Punch’ tracks with piquant observation the meanderings of two young Australians through Berlin as one of them, a writer, labours to mine his experiences. In ‘The Silences,’ Onya alumnus Rosanna Stevens elegantly sketches the throes of an inheritance both testamentary and personal.
The stories of this collection all avoid the pet hates outlined above. Each possesses a voice you’ve never encountered before, an almost wilful evasion of the tropes and postures expected. There are names here to note for future reference.
