Penguin Books Australia

VILLAIN  is a new collection by Justin Clemens. Invoking the spirit of celebrated French poet, vagabond and thief Francois Villon – some of whose ballads are translated here – these poems range from the violent and obscene to the lyrical and sublime, sometimes within a single verse.

Understanding the past illuminates the present; this personal history illuminates the man.  The lasting impression is of a remarkable person, shaped but not bowed by adversity, whose defining characteristics are a great zest for life and an abiding appreciation of all its bounties.
JUSTICE SUSAN CRENNAN, A.C.

To make stories look and sound so heartbreakingly real you need an unflinching eye and a compassionate ear and Tony Birch knows just what details are going to go straight to his reader's heart.  Loss, memory, and the invisible ties that bind – Birch's subject matter is ordinary life, lit from within with an honesty which makes his characters and their travails achingly familiar,' Cate Kennedy...

The early 1990s.  It's raining in Shillong.

Eight-year-old Sophie Das is convinced she is adopted.  But she is looking forward to meeting the baby kicking in her mother's stomach and that will keep her from running off to her real parents.  For now.

Aman Moondy will attempt the Indian Administrative Service exam for the second time.  Distracted by the lovely Concordella and plans...

'My story begins one thousand one hundred and eleven years ago, across another continent, in another age.'

This is the story of Rovar Ákos Pfliegman, a man with no relatives and no friends. No church, no office, no warm and embracing community. No formal education, no achievements, and no aspirations. The last remaining descendant of a line of the worst sort of losers on the planet.

Big Girl Now brings to vivid life a lost generation adrift in the brave, new India of the 21st Century.

Twenty-five-year-old Sophie Das has moved from her hometown, Shillong, to Bangalore, in search of work, fun and freedom.  Big Girl Now follows Sophie and her friends through the streets, offices, pubs, shopping malls, call-centers, and rock concerts of the money-mad city and into the homes of...

The package is wrapped roughly in butcher's paper, retrained with string.  Inside, is a tan leather journal crammed with tortured handwriting, a letter written in the decorative style of an adolescent girl, and a phallic curve of yellowed bone tattooed with an elaborate, snake-like engraving of a Chinese dragon.

Tests on the hone confirm it is carved from the tooth of a Physter Macrocephalus...

'It is the writer's act of imagination which is the basis of all good fiction, the kind of fiction that opens new worlds to the reader. The power of literature to move people, allow us to see into one another's hearts, to foster compassion and understanding and inspire political action works in a way that almost nothing else does.' – Foreword, Rosie Scott

Travelling Through the Family bring rural Australia to life through a clear-eyed and provocative vision of the way the land and our treatment of animals moulds the people who work with them.

Family, its histories, inheritances and bonds form a powerful core to the collection. There are homages to fathers and daughters as well as self-portraits where the influence of a country upbringing is rendered...

Winner Melbourne Lord Mayor's Creative Writing Awards, 2010
 
' Good on Paper is a flawless evocation of the literature machine, a witty remodelling of a crime caper and perfectly formed entertainment for readers, whatever their literary poison.' — Judging Panel
 
Somewhere out there, among the wounded egos and frustrated ambitions, among the mangled manuscripts, murky motives and missed...

A person will go blind if they stare at eh sun for too long.
She learnt this when she was very young and tried to reverse the process by turning her face towards the warmth of it and waiting.
Wondering what people who were not blind dreamed about.

A father teaches his daughter how to break whiskey bottles.
A woman looks for an old lover in a satellite photograph.
A man finds the voice of his dead wife...

The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me.  Think of spacetime, through which heavenly bodies fly forever.  They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fever qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing.  White dwarfs...

PUBLISHED TO MARK THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH, THIS MODERN AMERICAN CLASSIC CELEBRATES RICHARD BRAUTIGAN AT HIS WRY, PLAYFUL BEST.

In the early years of the 20th Century, a huge Victorian mansion stands isolated from the world in the Dead Hills of Eastern Oregon.

BENEATH OUR ARMOUR is unique. This sequence of portrait poems covers vast tracts of history, geography, and personae in a way that is at once intimate and epic.

Intimate, because Bakowski imagines his way into the lives of individuals as radically disparate as Cyril Connolly, Diego Rivera, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Smart.

Epic, because he transports us from Krakow in Poland, to Old Macau, and onto...

The groundbreaking modern classic that forged a new language of homosexual politics

When Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation was first published in 1971, Martin Duberman, writing in the New York Review of Books , hailed it as 'the only work that bears comparison, in terms of sustained analysis and theoretical complexity, with the best to appear from Women's Liberation'. Time commented, 'amoung the...

'The whole Wiradjuri nation was born in the Valley. Baiame came out of the sea in the east on his emu feet, a giant of a man, with his two wives, and be strode up through the Valley and he created it. It's the most important place. It's where the stories come from. That's why I won't let it go.'

A powerful novel about our frontier history which should be read by every Australian

As a successful trader and merchant in Sydney in the late 1870s, 'Young James' Beckett believes he has put his past behind him. When the enigmatic bushman Lancaster reappears in his life, Beckett knows he must confront the haunting truth of his early years.

Winner of the 2011 National Book Prize for Young People's Literature and 2012 Newbery Medal Honor Book, this stunning and engaging verse novel will captivate readers of all ages.

Moving to America turns Hà's life inside out.

For all the ten years of her life, Hà has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by . . . and the beauty...

Endorsed by Cate Kennedy, this is an eagerly awaited first story collection from an acclaimed young writer.

The award-winning stories in The Rest is Weight reflect Mills' years in Central Australia, as well as her travels to Mexico, Russia and China. The collection displays a confident diversity of narrative voices and a brevity in style.