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In Nabatieh, the small town in the south of Lebanon my forebears and I come from, Hassiba has been the uncontested diva of Ashura.

HEAT Joins <em>One-way Street</em>ʼs Literary Round Table

The second New Voice literary round table, focusing on creative nonfiction, took place in May, and featured Oscar Schwartz, whose essay 'Father Figures' appears in HEAT Series 3 Number 6.

I spent a few years working in cafés after graduating from art school. I didn’t see what else I could do. The work kept me moving, I was fed, had nice coffees and beers and wines, and most of all I enjoyed the many faces constantly passing in front of my eyes.

Emily was aware she had a problem, but it was a good, distracting problem from the more real, emotionally crippling problem of being in love with her boss. In the last few months, however, her shopping obsession had reached new problematic highs.

When she and Didier had first met a few weeks ago, he had been impressed to hear that she was an Australian. ‘La sauvage,’ he had said. ‘So wi-i-ild. L’Australie, c’est la sauvage.’

As a man writes this down, he calls to mind those many instances in which he wished he was at home, reading. He would say to himself, I wish I were at home now, and then picture himself huddled up with a book of no particular title, but nevertheless certain that the pleasure and comfort he found in that imagined tableau would exceed anything before his eyes.

The medium is a woman in her sixties, with long, thin, blonde hair stretched back into a ponytail. She rises from her chair and moves to the centre of the stage. Energy in the room shifts immediately. Everyone goes still and silent and sits up slightly taller in their white plastic chairs.

The vastness of fiction’s playground (and the seeming abundance of slides and ladders) makes it possible for the reader of ludic literature to flee the corner inhabited by the kids who don’t play and crash into the hall of King Arthur for all the wonder of Camelot on New Year’s Day.

It is reasonably safe to predict that the activities of reading, studying, writing and publishing literary fiction will increasingly become the preserve of a rump of ‘true believers’.

Paris, 2006: The gloom is thick and slow as suet, glutinous on eyeballs, eyeballs out on sticks already, in fact.

Of all the things I took to the front for Ukrainian soldiers, the most important was a kilogram of freshly roasted coffee from a hipster coffee house in the centre of Uzhhorod.

There was a kind of shuffling about. People looked uneasy, as though a crime were about to be committed. Somebody coughed as sirens sounded in the distance, then an old woman who looked as though she had been asleep, her head back and her mouth open, took up the skein of talk like a trout after a fly.

It was my turn to hold her. I wrapped her in the special stuff. Then he wrapped us both in the special stuff, leaving a corner untucked to fold himself into.

I’ve said it several times, both in public and in private: I do not lead an interesting life. Though many would say that my field of action, as the Detective called it, is fiction, I’ve always secretly believed that my field, my action, belongs to poetry.

Dear editor, The problem isn’t that the young desire to do wrong but, often, their inability to separate right from wrong. This ability arrives only with a sense of consequences, which is linked to an idea of time. The young cannot imagine a time outside their time.

I arrive at the doctor’s office early in the morning. I have forgotten my mask and ask for one at the front desk. Then I take a seat in the waiting room, which looks like a professionally managed Airbnb. Exposed light bulbs and plastic ivy hang from the roof. There is a pink neon sign on the wall that says, in cursive, ‘better together’.

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Prose

AshuraThe Tenth-Day Catastrophe of Duodecimal Shi’ism

HEAT Joins One-way Streetʼs Literary Round Table

Two Stories

Shopping

The Umbrella

Small Talk

Send Me a Sign?

Ludic Literature

The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing

On not seeing Worstward Ho!

Roasted Uganda

Brief Lives

Special Stuff

Death Takes Me

Dear Editor

Father Figures