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 Black Pepper is a house that likes to take chances. Geoff Page Australian Book Review, April 2013 CLICK HERE FOR ALL BLACK PEPPER PUBLICATIONS |
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author of Other Summers
and History of the Day $23.95 ISBN 9781876044787 |
author of Wimmera Winner of the Max Harris Poetry Award 2012 $24.95 ISBN 9781876044794 |
author of Fuel $22.95 ISBN 9781876044763 |
 Stephen Edgar is now recognised internationally as one of the most accomplished practitioners of metre and rhyme in English... Eldershaw is an achievement in narrative technique and descriptive power The Sydney Morning Herald | |  |
THIS WOMAN BY ADRIENNE EBERHARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 TASMANIA BOOK PRIZE FOR BEST BOOK   This Woman Adrienne Eberhard ISBN 9781876044725 RRPAUD $25.95 POETRY From the D’Entrecasteaux Channel to Canton and the eighteenth century to the present, these poems investigate ways in which physical places create fundamental emotional spaces. They give us an intimate view of our earthly presence. The title poem reminds us of what it means to be human, and a woman. An engrossing volume... Eberhard writes about the natural world as compellingly as any poet I can think of Judith Beveridge, Westerly MIRRANDA
BURTON WINS THE 2011
AUREALIS AWARD FOR GRAPHIC NOVEL FOR HIDDEN  Click here for her book Hidden JENNIFER HARRISON
WINS THE 2011
CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN POETRY (29 MARCH 2012) 
Click here for her
New & SelectedNEW TITLES  The Peastick
Girl
Susan Hancock ISBN 9781876044749 RRPAUD $34.95 AUS/NZ FICTION The story of Teresa Matheson, her sisters Mollie and Cass, and the untimely and mysterious death of their mother. Teresa has returned to Wellington after five years in Melbourne where she has written a quest novel for younger readers, had two affairs, and met the demon Arkeum. The Peastick Girl is a complex tragi-comedy of manners. MENTIONED AS A BEST BOOK FOR 2012 IN THE AGE  Where novels are concerned, a lot more attention should be paid to Susan Hancock's The Peastick Girl. Written in prose of eloquent intensity, this does for New Zealand passions and landscapes the kind of thing the Brontës did for Yorkshire. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, The Age, 8 December 2012, The Age's Recommended Books of the Year Wellington is as central to this novel as Egdon Heath is to Hardy’s Return of the Native... Katherine Mansfield’s city has become a wild place dominated by rain, light, wind and sound. Teresa’s house is a permeable membrane open to all weathers, a mere shack whose roof leaks and windows blow in, and through which disturbing memories swirl. Rod Edmond, New Zealand Studies Network (UK) A constant living presence on practically every page... as intense a story as one could imagine. Vincent O'Sullivan Susan Hancock’s debut novel is ambitious and extraordinary... The novel’s scale and scope are Joycean. Felicity Plunkett, The Canberra Times Hard not to be blown away by this staggeringly beautiful novel... by the scale of this superb work of art An impressive cast of finely nuanced characters Narratives of violence and dispossession. Marion Campbell This highly gifted novel... is
given a lustre and intensity by her precise,
musical prose, with its matchless evocations of the weather and the
landscapes around Wellington and the fugitive subtleties of her
characters’ inner lives.
Owen
Richardson, The
Age
An
absorbing story of youth, secrets, nature and the agony of
relationships... The Peastick Girl has just hit the shelves here in NZ.
NO
MagazineWellington
features almost like a character in it. It’s just incredibly Gothic and
it’s got all these descriptions of the weather and the wind sweeping
across the harbour and all the people in it are quite troubled and
Gothic as well. It’s really beautiful... I’m a really big fan, I just
loved it, I think it’s beautiful.
George
FM (Auckland)It took longer than I expected
to read The Peastick Girl - because it is just soooo good
to read.
ANZ
LitLovers LitBlog Cairo Paris
Melbourne
Maher Abou Elsaoud ISBN 9781876044756 RRPAUD $29.95 AUS FICTION Cairo Paris Melbourne is three novels in one, translated from the Arabic. It assumes poignancy with today’s Arab Spring. Young Zoheir, tormented by ghosts, escapes Cairo’s poverty in the City of the Dead. He travels to Paris, falls for the obsessive Caroline, is betrayed and finally propelled to Melbourne. Above a café, he finds a reason for living. A novel of the getting of responsibility. The author's many Arabic novels have been sold throughout the Middle East. See his interview on the Nile TV breakfast show. Readers will be
reminded of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, Kerouac’s On the
Road, or the novels of
Norwegian author Agnar Mykle.
 Hidden
Mirranda Burton ISBN 9780646559063 RRPAUD $20.00 GRAPHIC NOVEL "At first glance, Mirranda Burton's art room is a hidden world full of strange eccentric characters and mysterious minds. But stay a while and in that room you'll find all the joy and sadness of life, the pain and comfort of community, and the ultimate meaning of art. In Hidden Mirranda Burton is writing about what matters most, and she does so with such gentle humanity and wisdom. It is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read." Dylan Horrocks, author of Hicksville SOON TO BE PUBLISHED IN FRENCH BY LA BOÎTE À BULLES  WINNER OF THE 2011 AUREALIS AWARD FOR GRAPHIC NOVEL (ANNOUNCED 12 MAY 2012) A BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2011 WINNER READINGS BOOKS BUY HIDDEN AS AN EBOOK FOR THE KOBO VOX (A KOBO APP FOR IPAD WILL BE AVAILABLE LATER IN 2012) In a simple
yet effective visual style reminiscent of Persepolis
but wholly its own - and peppered with some pictures so vivid as to be
photographic - local artist Mirranda Burton draws on her time spent as
an art teacher for those with intellectual disabilities. Her tales are
hopeful, dramatic, always emotionally involving, and never
condescending. – Fiona Hardy, Readings Carlton
 The Bearded
Chameleon
Chris Mooney-Singh ISBN 9781876044718 RRPAUD $25.95 POETRY New work from Chris Mooney-Singh, an Australian poet who commutes between Australia, Singapore and India. The poems are set in India, which beguiled him in 1989 to adopt the Sikh way of life. Like the chameleon of the title poem, he adapts with sharp visual detail and comic irony. There are sparkling character portraits, e.g. of Mrs Pritima Devi. He has a story-teller’s eye and a lyricist’s sense of music. His poems reflect an inspiration which is perhaps unique to Australian poetry. Mark Roberts, The Rockford Street Review  This
is the bush —Banjo Paterson was never like this — Australia's first major epic poem $39.95 by direct order (including postage & handling within Australia) press here to pay by PayPal - or send cheque payment to Black Pepper Publishing 403 St Georges Rd, North Fitzroy VIC 3068 SEE 'HOMER'S EPIC' ON ABC1 LANDLINE OVER 2,200 COPIES
SOLD
 "Homer
Rieth's 359-page epic sequence dizzyingly gobbles up the landscape with
its catalogues of towns and surnames, jamming information and history
into a weird semi-religious commemoration of place: 'Chanceless ghosts
wander the hauntedplains/ looking for a breach in a dog-and -post fence... walking sublunary into a Wimmera mirage.' Lines hurtle down the centre of each page with descriptions and remembered tales rushing into each other in densely decorative, often repetitive language bunched with Australianisms: 'The water drags its feet at Litchfield/ it's a Mallee mood he says/ squinting at the sun/ they can all go to blazes.'" Gig Ryan's citation for Wimmera as a shortlisted title for The Age
Poetry Book of the Year 2010. Photo: Homer Rieth, 2010 One of Australia's finest poets Tim Lee, ABC Landline In its spiritual vision, it is reminiscent of the cosmic speculations of Wordsworth and Whitman Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne An impressive achievement, and a remarkable piece of work Paul Kane, Vassar College Wimmera is quite extraordinary Geoffrey Lehmann, The Weekend Australian, 7 November 2009 Grand in conception and impressively detailed in execution, this is a significant achievement indeed, and a major contribution to Australian literature That Homer Rieth is one of the finest lyric poets writing in Australia was apparent with the publication in 2001 of The Dining Car Scene Brian Edwards, Australian Book Review, December 2009 Relay-Reading of Homer Rieth's Epic Poem at the Nati Frinj Festival -- Saturday 29 October 2011 -- at the Nattimuk Pub -- from 12 Noon to 12 Midnight Wimmera
was shortlisted for
The Age Poetry Book of the
Year 2010 Anne of the Iron Door A NOVELLA Alan Loney ISBN 9781876044695 RRPAUD $26.95 FICTION A tale of Gutenberg and his mistress, Anne of the Iron Door, set in Strasbourg in 1436. In this extraordinary novel historical records weave the remarkable life of Anne. A world of deceit, betrayal, disease, unicorns, playing cards, the birth of printing and a strange tale of mutually unrequited love. Alan Loney’s work has always been at the cutting edge of New Zealand’s place in world literature Robert Creeley ALAN LONEY
ANNOUNCED THE WINNER OF THE 2011 JANET FRAME AWARD FOR
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN POETRY 6 MAY 2011  The Gentle Art of Tossing Alan Cornell ISBN 9781876044688 RRPAUD $27.95 FICTION A comic novel about Ches Fanning, a sportscaster reduced to calling sheep dog trials who discovers a willowy young dart player Sam Alley. He becomes her manager and promoter and takes her to England where she competes in the TV series Double Tops. Will Sam make it to the top? A comic tale of the Old Dart and the New  History
of the Day by Stephen Edgarauthor of Other Summers His poems are more sheerly beautiful from moment to moment than those of any other modern poet Clive James, Times Literary Supplement Here is a work which dares, in a postmodern, Microsoft era, to entertain serious aesthetic contemplations Michelle Cahill, Mascara Literary Review On the short list of the best living practitioners of verse, rhymed or blank Joshua Mehigan, Poetry (Chicago)  Other Stories
Wayne Macauley ISBN 9781876044664 RRPAUD $26.95 FICTION From the
acclaimed novelist and winner
For anyone who thrills to a
hypnoticof The Age Short Story Competition comes his much-awaited collection of short fictions. He makes the familiar seem eerie, like a Jeffrey Smart painting. In these satirical tales and fables of the outer suburban hinterland he imaginatively explores the margins of our culture. prose style and incisive social satire, I would urge you to discover his work Martin Shaw, Readings Monthly   This book isn’t just a good collection of short stories; it’s an exceptional work of Australian literature Wayne
Macauley should be recognized as one of Australia’s best living writers
– that he isn’t is an indictment of Australian literary culture. This
is one of the best books by an Australian I’ve read all year. Do
yourself
Emmett Stinson, 3RRR and Known Unknownsa favour and go buy it now Macauley is a
compelling voice in contemporary Australian literature... Other Stories
showcases his willingness to see - and interrogate - aspects of
Australian culture that normally pass under the radar. Macauley
is a spry and compassionate humorist of the postmodern soul.
In
lamenting the marginalisation of art from politics, he writes it back
into the picture.
Cameron Woodhead, The
Age, 23 October 2010(Pick of the Week, Fiction) His
fiction deals in parables and allegories, satirical fantasies of the
bureaucratised, neo-liberal world, and yarns that read like the dreams
of some collective suburban unconscious; he is a writer of great
purity, combining social critique, fertile imagination and the highest
aesthetic scruples. His work is some of the best fiction Australia has
to offer... the sardonic exaggerations of these stories have such
clarity of outline, and the writing is so controlled, that they have
the graphic power of the very best cartoons. Macauley’s work is dark
and more than tinged with melancholy; it is also often wildly funny.
Like Bail and Murnane, he is one of Australia’s deadpan visionaries, a
teller of tall and cerebral tales.
Owen Richardson, The
Sunday Age, 24 October 2010(Review of the Week, Books: "He is one of Australia's deadpan visionaries") "In
the dog days of summer, when the earth rolls and
sighs and a heat shimmer wobbles and distorts everything in the middle distance and beyond, who has not wanted, as evening falls, to take their mattress and pillow outside and sleep like a well-heeled vagabond under an open sky? In Boxstead Court, in Keilor Downs, as evening fell and the stars came out on just such a night as this, Michael Ebeling, the panel beater, who had not had a very good day, decided to do exactly that. He took the mattress from his bed and laid it down in the street, away from the fluorescent streetlight that threw down a cold-hearted glow. He took off his shirt, his pants, his socks and lay with his arms by his side." from 'One Night' JENNIFER HARRISON IS WINNER OF THE 2011 CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN POETRY  Colombine, New & Selected Poems Jennifer Harrison ISBN 9781876044657 RRPAUD $28.95 POETRY Colombine unusually contains two sets of ravish new poems, the title sequence and another called Fugue. The poems selected from her previous collections, from the Anne Elder Award-winning Michelangelo's Prisoners to her fourth book, Folly & Grief, illustrate the depth of her talent. Jennifer Harrison is astonishing. She comes from a place that was previously unknown Alan Loney COLOMBINE
SHORT LISTED FOR THE 2010 WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PREMIER'S BOOK AWARDS "A
major contribution to Australian poetry which demonstrates Harrison’s
evolving career and mastery. Its depth of intellectual and emotional
registers, in addition to its sustained craft, makes this poetry
demanding yet also immensely rewarding and enjoyable."
demonstrates a fine capacity for registering sensuous life while taking the reader on a variety of compelling intellectual and imaginative journeys. Australian Book Review
Book of the Year citation 2011
(Paul Hetherington)  Rockling King Hugh Tolhurst ISBN 9781876044671 RRPAUD $25.95 POETRY Like his first book, Filth and Other Poems, Rockling King should be kept out of reach of children. This bravura collection is profoundly sane, philosophical (in the sense of corrupting the minds of the young), at times political and often acutely witty poems. It continues his conversational embrace of inner city culture Classical (but post-barbarian in technique) Adam Aitken, The Australian's Review of Books         
BLACK PEPPER PICK OF THE SEASON  EMMA LEW'S POETRY COLLECTION The Wild Reply (1997) shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize, co-winner of The Age Book of the Year and winner of the Dame Mary Gilmore prize He was already the least curable, most diminished of people.
Civilization increased his moments of sadness. I knew this from the nature and number of scars. Let them be collected. Let them be classed with method. Reading Emma Lew’s poetry is like entering a cinema after the movie has started. Mysteriously, you arrive just at the climax. The characters are in full flight: the urgency of their need and demand for recognition is immediately apparent. In its scale and intensity hers is an essentially dramatic art, one which claims its own right to speak, with a defiant gesture and powerful assertion, against hosility, disappointment or - worse still - indifference. This is a first collection of uncommon strength justly called The Wild Reply. Ivor Indyk In The Wild Reply, Lew projects the cinematic mystery and baroque wit of Cocteau and Buñuel. Adam Aitken, The Australian’s Review of Books
An extraordinary book as well as an extraordinary first book
Bev Roberts, Australian Book Review
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NEWS (FOR DETAILS CLICK HERE) HOMER RIETH WINS THE 2012 MAX HARRIS POETRY AWARD FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
SHELTON LEA VIDEO AVAILABLE STEPHEN EDGAR MAKES A NOVEL CONRIBUTION TO THE RAILWAYMAN'S WIFE (ALLEN & UNWIN, 2013) AN IMAGINARY MOTHER IS CHOSEN AS THE AGE PICK OF THE WEEK FOR NON-FICTION WAYNE MACAULEY'S NEW NOVEL THE COOK PUBLISHED WITH TEXT PUBLISHING HAS BEEN REPUBLISHED BY QUERCUS (UK) AND ITHAKI (TURKEY) (TEXT HAS ALSO REPUBLISHED BLUEPRINTS FOR A BARBED-WIRE CANOE AND CARAVAN STORY). OTHER STORIES BY MACAULEY IS STILL AVAILABLE AT BLACK PEPPER) - THE STORY 'A HAIR OF THE DOG' FROM OTHER STORIES HAS BEEN BROADCAST ON RADIO NATIONAL SUNDAY STORY THIS WOMAN BY ADRIENNE EBERHARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 TASMANIA BOOK PRIZE FOR BEST BOOK JENNIFER HARRISON HAS BEEN APPOINTED A BOARD MEMBER OF THE NEW INTERNATIONAL POETRY STUDIES INSTITUTE BASED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CANBERRA MIRRANDA BURTON AUTHOR OF HIDDEN APPEARED AT THE NONFICTIONOW CONFERENCE NOVEMBER 2012 MAHER ABOU ELSAOUD INTERVIEWED ABOUT HIS NOVEL CAIRO PARIS MELBOURNE ON NILE TV BREAKFAST SHOW ON 10 OCTOBER 2012 HOMER RIETH WINS $10,000 RESEARCH GRANT FOR THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY SORROWS (SEPTEMBER 2012) MIRRANDA BURTON AUTHOR OF HIDDEN AT THE MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL 2012 JENNIFER HARRISON'S POEM 'AUS-LAN' INSPIRES VISUAL WORKS BY ANNETTE IGGULDEN MIRRANDA BURTON AUTHOR OF HIDDEN AT THE GOING WEST BOOKS AND WRITERS FESTIVAL IN SEPTEMBER 2012 IN TITIRANGI NEW ZEALAND MIRRANDA BURTON'S HIDDEN WINS 2011 AUREALIS AWARD FOR GRAPHIC NOVEL JENNIFER HARRISON WINS THE CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN AWARD FOR EXCELLECNCE IN POETRY MRRANDA BURTON'S HIDDEN TO BE PUBLISHED IN FRENCH BY LA BOÎTE À BULLES MIRRANDA BURTON'S HIDDEN NAMED A BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2011 BY READINGS BOOKS JENNIFER HARRISON CITED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2011 IN AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW (PAUL HETHERINGTON) ALAN LONEY ANNOUNCED THE WINNER OF THE 2011 JANET FRAME AWARD FOR POETRY OTHER STORIES BY WAYNE MACAULEY CHOSEN AS PICK OF THE WEEK (FICTION) BY THE AGE AND REVIEW OF THE WEEK (BOOKS) WIMMERA RECEIVES HEAD NOTICE IN ONLINE POETRY JOURNAL THE CHIMAERA HOMER RIETH SHORTLISTED FOR THE AGE POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2010 AND THE BLAKE POETRY PRIZE 2010 ADRIENNE EBERHARD’S POEMS FEATURE IN TRANSLATION ON NEW FRENCH AUDIO LITERATURE SITE SECOUSSE ANDREW SANT POEM FEATURES IN ELIZABETH BISHOP'S HOUSE FOR HER CENTENARY CONTACT DETAILS NEW ALL PUBLICATIONS BROWSE FROM A-Z BY TITLE BROWSE FROM A-Z BY AUTHOR TITLES BY YEAR ESSAYS AND TALKS LINKS SUBMISSIONS POLICY HISTORY Launch Speech highlights for The Peastick Girl Marion Campbell (author and winner of the WA Premier's Book Award) 14 June 2012 The peastick scaffolding is left in the untended vegetable patch, in the wake of the father’s disappearance, revisited after the mother’s death, many years later. This is no Eden... Teresa, having lost her secret husband and running from the insights of her Russian lover Nikolai, chooses to return to Wellington, offering herself up to breakdown. Around her unravelling the many stories of this colossal work unfold. A marvellously mobile play of identifications as you travel elastically across the narrative fronts in a ride of the highest exhilaration... Hard not to be blown away by this staggeringly beautiful novel and the worlds it conjures through the return of the principal character, Teresa, to Wellington - to confront the demon which has brought her to the brink... These demon winds blow through the cracks of the presentable, through the wounds in flesh; they hiss through the grasses and fissures of the land; they provoke the palpable, audible, and kinesic sense of things unravelling beyond the visible... Great writing is unconcerned with fashion. It mines anachronism. It revisits forms, fables and myths to grapple with the unspeakable or unspoken... Teresa’s is a huge Persephone story into which an impressive cast of finely nuanced characters is drawn. It stages with astounding courage the fury of memory, historical and personal, grappling with desire, and how they can become mortally locked together. It dares again and again to crack open the exoskeletons of cliché, to forge a language of high libido, passion and embodiment, of raucous synaesthesia, speaking to all the reader’s senses, quickening in rhythm and achingly vivid in image-making to break from paralysis, from parlous repetition, to return one to the potential for connection, for love, and perhaps for redemption. Perhaps we hope, like Persephone, Teresa will move ‘out of the realm of shadow towards summer and the sun’. The Peastick Girl eschews the facile feel-good ending; that sentimental sleight of hand. It participates in major works of the past as in a parallel but equally intensely invested life. It multiplies its own riches this way... This meditation on reinhabiting The Duchess of Malfi, Webster’s tragedy of betrayal and revenge, to address the Maori-Pakeha question leads to an intoxicating textual transfusion, from the physical, immediate night, to the night, equally teeming with life, of the inhabited text. The writing creates several senses of time: the headlong rush into disaster past for Teresa, the suspended shards of the traumatic event in ‘that sealed chamber’ which rides within her, the relative time of the unfolding action experienced backwards and forwards by other characters as they are pulled into Teresa’s story, the leisurely time of a rolling, indifferent cosmos, but pervasive, beyond all of these is the sense of a time without end. Manifestly ‘Everything is in movement; everything flows’. The writing doesn’t give you relentless heart-stopping fear in pulling you back into the stranglehold of trauma; it triggers a saving hilarity even at the eye of the mind-blowing storm. Everywhere wit and absurdist vision attend the characters’ passionate confrontations, a comic vision which has you hooting helplessly, even as you dread what wells up from the opening fissures... Shocking irony sharpens perception of the enormity of crimes of dispossession. In this extraordinarily dynamic work, even sleepers are on the move: they are taken in the great inter-subjective flow, participating in a kind of collective unconscious; there is the sense of the Joycean riverrun of all those sleeping minds: ‘In the almost complete darkness she closes her eyes and out she goes on the rubbish-strewn river of sleep that flows through cisterns and culverts and systems everywhere until it comes to the wastes that lie along the edges of the conscious world.’ It handles huge Felliniesque scenes of complex social interaction, like the opening night of the Georgian play, or the feminist beach party, with the same bravura, verve and comic brilliance it brings to intimacy or solitude... People are tiny figures on the surface of this great pulsing organism. Tiny as Breughel’s Icarus. Multi-tracked, the writing can give you layers of so-called inner and outer action at once through extraordinarily deft montage. There is no flatfooted scene-setting as mere background to action: concrete evocation works at several levels at once: character disposition, embodied perception, projection, intellect striving to navigate these, and thus action even in radical passivity. It is hard not to invoke genius for the hallucinatory awareness made available through the poetic powers and moral imagination of this writer. As is the case with great works of art The Peastick Girl has a sense of inevitability about it. It also has the depth and resonance that only a work long decanted can have. The narrative weaves the enchantments of passionate encounter and mortal struggle, lending a local habitation to it all through the baroque music of the writing, that oceanic manifold. Dramatically unfolding action races you forward as the captivation of the writing swoons you back, achingly, breathtakingly. I feel deeply humbled by the scale of this superb work. Other
Summers
Stephen Edgar Some of the finest lyric poetry to have been written anywhere in recent times Gregory Kratzmann ABR The printing of a masterpiece Alan Loney This gem of a book... reminiscent of writers such as Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco Fiona Capp The Age The Invention of Everyday Life Nicolette Stasko As graceful and compelling as Woolf’s early 20th-century experiment with consciousness Stella Clarke The Australian |
