HEAT Series 3 Number 10

‘The self is not fixed, but reflects and refracts, appearing in innumerable variations,’ writes Isabella Trimboli, in her essay on diaries and the writers who keep them that opens the new HEAT. Four short stories follow, each, in their own way, concerned with the construction of the self. In Ellena Savage’s piercing satire ‘Bare Life’, a woman muses on the duelling forces of body and mind at the nexus of capitalism, sex and philosophy. Kat Capel’s ‘Sightseeing’ follows a man with unsettling obsessions as he travels from Melbourne to Guangzhou, searching for human connection. Danish author Harald Voetmann (trans. Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen) peers into childhood fixations in ‘Common Room Rocking Horse’. And the narrator in Lin Bai’s ‘The Light in the Mirror’ (trans. Nicky Harman) recalls queer dreams and desires of a girlhood spent in rural China.

Contents

Isabella Trimboli  Life’s Work  prose
Ellena Savage  Bare Life  prose
Harald Voetmann  Common Room Rocking Horse  prose
Kat Capel  Sightseeing   prose
Lin Bai  The Light in the Mirror  prose

Frontispiece by Matlok Griffiths