Luke Carman

A new work of fiction by the award-winning author of An Elegant Young Man and Intimate Antipathies. In stories of desire, grief, and exaltation, the collection reflects, as its title suggests, on life at its most ordinarily ecstatic – life, in other words, such as it is.

Second City is a showcase of the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s Western Suburbs such a fertile region for writers.

The essays in Luke Carman’s collection follow the writer in his oscillations through anxiety, outrage and ecstasy, and in the process explore the connections between writing and dreaming, writing and mental illness, writing and the complications of family life. Carman explores the particular challenges faced by writers who grow up in the contested borderlands of the suburbs – always returning to his great obsession, the home on a small mountain, where his antipathies with the real world first began to shape his imagination. The much anticipated new book by the author of cult classic An Elegant Young Man.

For a long time Western Sydney has been the political flash-point of the nation, but it has been absent from Australian literature. Luke Carman’s first book of fiction is about to change all that: a collection of monologues and stories which tells it how it is on Australia’s cultural frontier. His young, self-conscious but determined hero navigates his way through the complications of his divorced family, and an often perilous social world, with its Fobs, Lebbos, Greek, Serbs, Grubby Boys and scumbag Aussies, friends and enemies. He loves Whitman and Kerouac, Leonard Cohen and Henry Rollins, is awkward with girls, and has an imaginary friend called Tom. His sensitivity in a tough environment makes life difficult for him – he is anything but an elegant young man. Carman’s style is packed with thought and energy: it captures the voices of the street, and conveys fear and anger, beauty and affection, with a restless intensity.