Guan Wei’s artist’s book Method for Eggplant Cultivation is accompanied here with three preparatory sketches for the work.

Eggplants first appeared in Guan Wei’s work more than a decade ago. They appeal to him for their colour, shape and sheen and because they have an element of danger. According to Guan Wei, eggplants are considered slightly poisonous in China, a liability eliminated by cooking them with garlic. 

The Decameron, Brian Castro writes, indicates the moment of change between antiquity and the modern sensibility.

March: The days very still and very hot. The light dusted over the city. No one called, no one came. Very pleased with the silence.

In 2003 B. R. Dionysius received an unexpected tax debt thanks to a literary grant that didn’t factor in HECS repayments.

Janis Joplin (1943-1970) did not die in a fire. But it is often premised that she burned out. An overdose of unexpectedly pure heroin killed her. Accidentally. She killed herself. The ambiguity of victim or suicide remains unresolved.

Even as I uncover materials that suggest Renate’s appearance – a portrait of her sister on an East Berlin balcony in 1961, prisoner records from age sixteen till liberation, a Hollerith card that catalogues her physical features – she remains stubbornly abstract, a dream that can’t be retrieved.

At the close of our second series, print seemed to be firmly on the way out. ‘The electronic medium beckons,’ the editorial of that last issue declared, ‘with its heavenly promise of weightlessness and omnipresence.’ And yet here we are: Australia’s international literary journal, available once again as a beautiful printed object, albeit a different looking one.