A Night of Hot Quirky Shows

Dear Philomena, 

You were so wonderful the other night! Thanks for coming all that way to perform at our show.

It means a lot to us!

Warm regards. The Quirky Team

Robin, Lucy and Claire

...a moon-draggingly good work of fantasy worldbuilding...

Parceled into six sections comprising 67 brief, loosely connected vignettes, the contents of this volume from Australian author van Rijswijk (The World as a Clockface) form a colorful mosaic about the residents of the walled city of Luckycola, in the imaginary land of Incognita. Luckycola is home to a motley cast of characters who go about their episodic adventures, including Martina Waldesmuller, who’s incarcerated in Godown Prison; Martina’s dolly-clutching baby sister, Honeysuckle Rose; and Hadji, the local storyteller and mythmaker. Van Rijswijk imparts a fantastic quality to characters and their lives by elaborating the peculiar circumstances under which they live—for example, most of the city’s orphans are undernourished because “the country’s milk supply was diverted to the casein factory where it was used to form outer shells of lightweight pocket-grenades.” Her incantatory prose style and meticulous eye for gritty detail further amplify the strangeness of her setting, as when she writes, “In the villages, there were water-buffalo calves with ribs like corrugated iron, and there were unfed cats, and there were hens squatting in the shade cast by broken stone urns.” The author adds, “It was even said that a good storyteller could drag the full moon with the seductiveness of his tongue.” This is a moon-draggingly good work of fantasy worldbuilding. (July) 

Review in Publishers' Weekly

House of the Flight-helpers

"The people of Incognita have walled themselves in..."

House of the Flight-helpers by Tasmanian author Philomena van Rijswijk is a strange and satirical narrative, a mythological mosaic of horrors, feather phobias, dead saints, clay flutes, terrible birds, Border Monkeys, forbidden zones and unsettling forebodings. It casts the reader into the future, a future left trammelled by the glacial passage of xenophobia and exclusion. It is a parable of sorts, and considers the biggest questions and insecurities of our age, one of the most poignant of which is: when we exclude the outsider, are we, in fact, imprisoning and impoverishing ourselves?

Philomena van Rijswijk lives in Tasmania, the ‘south island’ of Australia. Her last novel, The World as a Clock-face, was published by Penguin. Her poems and short stories have been published in collections and literary journals in Australia, Ireland and India. The author’s work was included in Best Australian Stories 2002 (Black Inc) and Best Australian Poetry 2005 (UQP). Some of her stories have been translated into Hindi by Dr Aruna Sitesh and published in Delhi. Her poetry collection, Bread of the Lost, was published by Walleah Press in 2013. In 2016, she was awarded the Masterton District Fellowship, spending three weeks at the New Zealand Pacific Studio at Mt Bruce in New Zealand. Philomena lives alone with her two budgerigars, Neftali and Mathilde, in the south east of the island.  She has five adult children and eight grandchildren.

Cover image by Watanabe Shotei aka Watanabe Seitei (1851–1918)Tartarus Press UK

Siberian Sleep Berries

...on "Bread of the Lost"