We hear a lot about the death of language. Whether it’s the death of the author, the novel, the letter – every literary item imaginable has, it seems, been eulogised. Michael Quinion’s Gallimaufry is a delightful book that trawls through the obituaries of the many such fallen soldiers: words that have sailed off into the ether.

A word-nut will have lots of fun with this book. Quinion is an engaged guide, and uses a light writing style, which is a blessing when he navigates the linguistic and historical origins of the words he studies. The title word, gallimaufry, which now means a ‘hodgepodge’, comes from old French. It originally meant a stew or sauce, and it’s still used today, though perhaps only in very enlightened (or pretentious) corners of the English-speaking world. Quinion has divided his enquiry into five thematic parts. The first deals with food and drink, and is of course my favourite; the second with health and medicine; the third, entertainment and leisure; the fourth, transport and fashion; and the fifth, names, employment and communications. Those of you with refined palates will relish the knowledge that the word bottarga (or cured fish roe) – as we know it in Australia – came from the Arabic butarkha originally. There are lots of wonderful little slices through history like this that make you feel like you’re lifting up a magic curtain into the past.

Wonderfully, the thematic division of the book allows you to discover English-speaking habits and cultures that are long fallen by the wayside. Quinion fossicks around in the verbal dirt for things I now kind of regret finding out. Harry Potter fans will know that a bezoar is a ‘concretion of hair or vegetable fibre that forms naturally in the stomachs of ruminant animals’, used once upon a time as an antidote to poison. Men awaiting the barber’s attention used to enjoy the music of a cittern. Also, find out what Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts were about wearing a wig! However, I just couldn’t be enthralled by discovering that the zingerilla and the bransle were fancy lady-and-gentleman dances. Perhaps my fellow Jane Austen readers would beg to disagree.

Despite the subject matter of Gallimaufry being predominantly old and now obscure words, Quinion is certainly no obscurant. There are lots of treasures to be had here for readers of British historical fiction, and even those who once pondered why the Australian Women’s Weekly ‘Dolly Varden’ cake was termed as such. (The Dolly Varden was a rakishly side-slung hat. Though what connection a hat has to a cake with a doll stuck in it, I’ll never have the capacity to fathom.) If you like odd language trivia and showing off your vocabularistic prowess, you will like this book, as it will enable you to say things like: ‘Did you know that “fig” used to mean “banana” in the West Indies at one stage?’ NO, I DIDN’T. And now I do.

NB. I work at Oxford University Press.

In popular TV show Thank God You’re Here, Australian actors and comedians are thrown into a situation they know nothing about and attempt to make it out alive, as well as angle for a few laughs along the way. Even as only an occasional television watcher, I’m familiar with the dark edges of Bob Franklin’s deadpanning; in this skit, he tells his ‘employee’, a tea lady, that she is not going to be ‘sacked’, but ‘put down’. That famously head-cocked view of the world paired with its being the first in Affirm Press‘s Long Story Shorts series made Franklin’s début publication, Under Stones, an immediately compelling proposition when Affirm’s Associate Publisher, Rebecca Starford, told me about it late last year. (Note: Bec and I are now colleagues at Kill Your Darlings.)

Franklin’s comedic experience tells in this collection of short stories, but not in the expected tally of belly laughs. (In fact, it’s the most self-consciously quirky story, ‘Thesis Examining a Student’s Path to Crime’, that strikes the one false note for me.) Rather, he’s a deft technician of story and its elements – tension, denouement, character, voice. These competencies serve him well in drawing the reader down through a suburban landscape that is at once familiar and much stranger than we know it. In ‘Ironman’, the first story, Ironman is a high-functioning Australian middle-class hero who ‘pounds the roads’ past the ‘abo’ perched on the beach. ‘Get used to me, I’m part of the landscape now,’ is Ironman’s catchcry, which rebounds between other racially charged insults and his wife’s tired half-silence. The bleakness that Ironman associates with native Australians, however, is visited upon him in a mocking, symbolic and haunting fashion when he arrives home one evening to discover his wife and children have disappeared.

It is clear from this, and many of its companions, that in Under Stones, Franklin has assembled myriad tales of unexpected disturbance and horror that scratch at the wales and wounds we bear. While the situations he describes are unexceptional, the conclusions his characters draw often are. In ‘Soldier On’, Phil, an itinerant but considerate son visits his parents in Paignton, Devon. Phil carps about illicit substances and the painful but necessary observances required of a filial visitor, but he also witnesses an unsettling longing in the elderly he sees around him. At first, it’s reasonable to suspect that his sensitivity is purely a correlate of his discomfort at being a distant son – one visit to the frozen waterside ends in Phil sighting aging faces under the ice. But illicit substances aren’t only for the young and disaffected among us.

Other stories in the collection possess an even more heightened sense of unease. ‘Take the Free Tour’ is a capacious psychological tale that toes the real/unreal divide most chillingly. Its eerie depths are accentuated by the sheer commonness of its protagonist, one Duncan Shaw – ‘unremarkable local reporter by day’ and ‘Dale Thorn, narrator of some of the toughest, most sarcastic private eye adventures that ever failed to impress an editor’ at night. The ‘tour’ of the title is a complimentary gander at a pornographic website, which speedily turns into a fixation. That in itself is no big juice, but the ‘voyeuristic orgy of depravity’ coincides with a number of inexplicable, vile acts at Duncan’s workplace: ‘marks … the colour of pale flesh, and phallic in shape’ turn up on photographs that are supposed to accompany a piece he is writing, and his autumnal desktop background is supplanted by a graphic image of a blonde woman. Endlessly worse manifestations disport themselves, implicating Duncan to his workmates. Frighteningly for Duncan – and the reader – he cannot fathom how these degenerate episodes materialised.

The conjunction of the ordinary and the weird has long been an inspiration to writers, and Franklin is no different. Far from being merely spooky or bizarre tales, the stories in Under Stones effect their rumour of unease on the winds of what we’re already hiding from: fear, the inexplicable and what’s hiding under stones.

There’s a reason I avert my eyes from multi-author short story collections, and it’s this: you have favourites among the throng, and nothing can stop you from loving those bright-eyed scamps more than the others. I’m an egalitarian reader, and love to love everything the same. But it’s difficult to shy away in the case of a book like Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books, a collection no doubt published because independent Melbourne bookshop Readings has a clientele able to discern their Carver from their Chekhov, their Kennedy from their Lahiri. An editorial team headed by Jason Cotter and Michael Williams has brought together the shining lights of the short fiction form in Australia, including Alex Miller, Peter Goldsworthy, Cate Kennedy, Paddy O’Reilly and Tony Birch. The book not only brings good literary will to its readers; in addition, proceeds from the book go to The Readings Foundation, which supports local community and arts projects.

So, a book full of treasures. But the heart is wilful, and it goes where it pleases. Can I say how surprised I was by where it took me, and how grateful I was to discover the final destination? For example, I know who Mark Seymour is – he’s indirectly responsible for the longstanding but one-sided love affair I had with Paul McDermott when I was but an impressionable teen. But I had no idea Seymour was such a master of voice, of getting into a fictional skin. ‘The Scragger’ is a masterpiece showcasing the laconic Australian sporting male. Shawsie is a footballer, the ‘new dog in the kennel’. His anxieties are necessarily more hidden than others’, but his desires are plain for everyone to see. It’s the last game of the season, and he wants a run, badly. But he’s new in from the state league and the opposition players are huge, vicious, scraggin’. Coded in expletives, Shawsie’s verbiage is a wonderful couch for the ‘first run’ dream and the ‘couldn’t give a shit’ attitude expected of the sportsperson:

As if I don’t care about people’s feelings. Course I care. I mean, if I look at your face and you’re upset about something I’m going to notice that, right? And I’ll probably ask you what the matter is. On the other hand, I’m not soft either. I don’t suck up to anybody. I mean, there are bullshitters everywhere, don’t you reckon? Some people really know how to get the sympathy vote. ‘Squeaky wheels’ Dad calls ‘em … Mum too for that matter. ‘Watch out for the squeaky wheels,’ she used to say. That was a long time ago though.

Seymour’s writing is immediate and physical; it feels like it feeds straight into the part of the brain that perceives three-dimensional movement.

Like sentiment and football, youth and small town boredom are uncomfortable bedfellows, and Jenny Sinclair’s ‘Postcards’ is a bang-on sketch of what a kid with an adventurous bent might do: ‘Technically speaking it was a motorbike.’ In four skilful pages, Sinclair wraps the teenaged Owen in well-meaning relatives and benign promises and also the promising dust of the road. It’s a great little piece, with a focus on loving escape.

Now that I look again at Robbie Egan’s ‘Snake’, I’m starting to see a theme in the stories in Readings and Writings that have so enthralled me. ‘Snake’ begins with some kids playing around a river on a day Melburnians won’t need to try too hard to imagine, a day of blazing heat and lazy languor. Fans oscillate and boys smoke while their friends on the riverbank mangle their turn jumping into the water. But every action has its reverse and a single event has the day in tragic rewind.

Plenty of the other stories are great companions. David Cohen’s ‘Woodcutter’ is whimsical and fatalistic in the way of George Saunders, and Alex Miller’s ‘The End’ is a seemingly gentle story that groans terrifically at its end with a brutal kind of respite. In ‘Icarus’, Leanne Hall figures the remembrance of an installation artist in a way that foregrounds the allure of both the work and the strange unknowable person behind tangible flights of fancy. The foreword by Shane Maloney laughingly captures the character of the Readings enterprise, a place where ‘Helen Garner freewheeled past with a gasfitter’s apprentice over her shoulder’ and ‘The proprietor, a ruffian named Rubbo, stood behind an oak-laden counter, idly slitting the pages of uncut hardbacks with a switchblade stiletto.’ Rubbo’s introduction is a great read too, telling the story behind the big blue R.

Such were my bright-eyed scamps. Perhaps yours are different?

Thoughts before reading: It’s got a family tree. I hate books with family trees. If I can’t remember who the characters are, you’re not doing your job properly, Author. Is that a typo I see? This book looks dense. I guess I’ll just borrow this one from Maddie and see how it goes.

Thoughts at page 90: This is is quite good. Bit draft-ish, which is not surprising considering Larsson passed away just after handing in the manuscripts for publication. The characters are totally insane. I’ve always loved a heroine with her own odd sense of morality outside that imposed by society, and Lisbeth Salander is exactly that. Odd, attractive, with a penchant for slogan t-shirts (‘Armageddon was yesterday – today we have a serious problem’), mistreated by a government welfare system that doesn’t understand her and governed by her own fierce independent intelligence, Salander is such a sympathetic character. I like Mikael Blomkvist, too: a journalist down in the dumps after being found guilty of libel. But of course, Larsson shows the depth of his integrity by making him the author of a book on the incompetence of Swedish financial journalists. This will be a pretty good ride.

Page 194: Hilarious Apple computer fetish. ‘Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerP.C. 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity BlueTooth and built-in C.D. and D.V.D burners.’ Also, quaint punctuation.

Page 201: There’s a section explaining the Swedish government’s social welfare protection system, which Salander is subject to as someone under the social and psychiatric guardianship of the state. It’s oddly placed and reads like a footnote, but it’s fascinating. There’s no doubt what Larsson thinks: ‘Taking away a person’s control of her own life – meaning her bank account – is one of the greatest infringements a democracy can impose, especially when it applies to young people.’ It’s a sobering portrait of the weaknesses of the Scandinavian welfare states. Another thread that runs through the book is the cruelty of violence against women, represented through the vicious rape of Salander by someone who should be protecting her. Each part of the book begins with a statistic: ’18% of the women in Sweden have been threatened by a man’, and the original Swedish title of the book was ‘Women Who Hate Men’.

Page 470: Shit, what time is it? I can’t feel my legs.

Page 504: THIS IS AMAZING.

THE END: Nooooooooooo holy mother of Beatrice. That was SO GOOD. Bring on the next one.

I’m as little physically intrepid as it is humanly possible for a person to be. I do not like rollercoasters. I do not like to change hairdressers very often. God forbid that I go on some kind of orienteering foray of an afternoon. And I detest horror movies. A girl like that needs to get her kicks from somewhere, and I am lucky to be able to satisfy my minimal urges for life’s tasty variety through…can you guess? Books? Oh, you’re so smart. Let me buy you a drink.

You may scoff, but if you don’t think that words can help you can swim in adventure straits, then you haven’t read Crime and Punishment. Or Memoirs of a Bugatti Hunter. Or Liar by Justine Larbalestier. Reading this book is like walking a tightrope. I’m not saying it’s some kind of literal safari or anything. But Liar is certainly a masterful exercise in maintaining reader tension: it’s tight, then lulled, then tight again, all the way to its extraordinary end. And even then, I wasn’t quite sure whether I was off the ride yet.

My father is a liar and so am I.
But I’m going to stop. I have to stop. I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight.
No lies, no omissions.
That’s my promise.
This time I truly mean it.

‘Telling the Truth’: such is our introduction to Micah Wilkins. She’s a liar, and we’re duly warned. So we stick with her through all the stories she tells, and there are a lot. Micah starts off with the time she perpetuated the fiction that she was a boy at school. Then, she tells you about her half-black, half-white family, which includes a strange branch of reclusive folk on a two-hundred acre farm. There’s her brother, Jordan. And there’s Zach, her boyfriend. Two pages in, though, and Zach is missing. Three pages, and Zach is dead.

The death of a young boy is a tragedy anywhere, but in a high school, it’s a trigger. Even at a progressive high school like the one Micah attends, the news is a spritzer pill in a glass of water. Zach’s ‘real’ girlfriend, Sarah, is surprised that he had anything to do with Micah, as is everyone else. Micah is a ‘freak’, a loner. The tacit avoidance Micah usually countenances in her school days becomes full-blown hostility as people begin to suspect she had something to do with Zach’s death. But some of the people around her realise that there’s more to her than strangeness and untruths, and as all this unravels, so too do Micah’s stories. ‘I haven’t been entirely honest,’ she says. Perhaps the liar is becoming a truth teller? If so, then who is Micah really?

In Micah, Larbalestier has created a character whose reliability is inversely proportionate to her appeal. Excruciating though Micah’s physical and psychological instability is for her, she is also a deeply fascinating and vital character. The danger with a book focused on the dichotomy of truth and lies is the potential prioritisation of a moral axis of some kind, but we’re never in any danger of that in Liar. Sensitive exploration of the adolescent spikes of identity is what we get instead. Identity is a popular topic in young adult fiction, and it’s well explored here, with fantasy, metaphor and reality holding hands. Micah is a rustling, sparking ball of falsehood and confusion in the midst of youth’s mysterious hot heat, which Liar evokes superbly. Larbalestier shows how the distinction between reality and fantasy becomes moot in that context, because thinking and feeling is just that difficult, alien and animal. It’s this insight and compassion that makes Liar a riveting, supremely put together book about the addictive utility of saying things that are not true.

It’s safe to say that we’re used to thinking of the living and the dead as pretty different creatures. Leave it to Neil Gaiman – winner of winner of 3 Hugos, 2 Nebulas, 1 World Fantasy Award, 4 Bram Stoker Awards, 6 Locus Awards, 2 British SF Awards, 1 British Fantasy Award, 3 Geffens, 1 International Horror Guild Award and 1 Mythopoeic – to bring members of the two camps together in his newie, The Graveyard Book, which has wonderful illustrations, just this side of spooky, by Chris Riddell.

Nobody Owens is just a baby when the man Jack enters his home and kills his family. Nobody – Bod – escapes the same fate, having wandered out of his cot, and his room, out into the night and into a graveyard. A plump and shimmering woman, Mrs Owens, is surprised to see him there. She is, after all, a ghost, and babies fleshy with life don’t often stumble into graveyards at night. Her bafflement doesn’t last long, however, and Mrs Owens persuades her husband, Mr Owens, that they should take care of the baby. They ensure that his childhood is safe and loving, and the Freedom of the Graveyard enables him to see in the dark and walk some ways that living usually cannot.

But it is Bod the man Jack was after, and even in the graveyard, he is not safe, for Jack is still searching him out. To make sure Bod is prepared for the Outside, his guardian, Silas, seeks out an education for him that covers everything from his letters to Fading and Sliding and Dreamwalking. These lessons prove useful, whether to escape the company of Ghûlheim’s ghouls, Victor Hugo and the Thirty-Third President of the United States (they take their names from the last meal they had), or the mysterious fright of the Sleer, which slumbers in a tomb beneath the graveyard. Of course, it’s not only the lessons he received that helps Bod to emerge from these otherworldly encounters unscathed; often, his survival depends on his thoughtful nature and his quick wits.

In The Graveyard Book, like many of Gaiman’s other works, we see what might happen if our ‘normal’ world was revealed to have fantastic elements operating throughout it. Gaiman is adept at adopting various mythical characters – witches, werewolves, ghouls, ghosts – and creating circumstances for them to collide with regular people. He also throws in a couple of his own creations, and other novelty in his storytelling comes from playful cross-history tension – when quizzed about his education to date, Bod says: ‘Letitia Borrows teaches me writing and words, and Mr Pennyworth teaches me his Compleat Educational System for Younger Gentlemen with Additional Material for those Post Mortem.’ It’s always a pleasure to see how Gaiman tumbles wondrous creatures free from their historical binds, and The Graveyard Book‘s recombinant mythmaking continues his track record of creating delightful otherworldly entertainment.

Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay, her memoir about chronic illness and recovery, is an incredible book; and one of its most interesting lines for me was: ‘A lyric speaker must occupy the lyric moment as it’s happening. Or so it seems to me at this moment.’ I took Manguso’s ‘lyric speaker’ as a reference to a lyric poet and, hideously underacquainted with poetry as I am, took recourse via The Oxford Companion to the English Language (well, okay, Wikipedia – I have tried to get a copy of the Companion from work, but I think it’s out of print) to find out what kind of a poet that was. The Companion says that a lyric poem is ‘usually a poem with rhyming that expresses personal feelings’. Okay, so pretty broad and, as it turns out, not really a good definition to base my research about Manguso on, as she’s an acclaimed prose poet. (Yes, I know I shouldn’t be using Wikipedia for ‘research’, but I am on holiday, dammit.)

Nevertheless, I enjoyed Siste Viator, her second book. Manguso’s poetry often takes the form of short stanzas, much as in her memoir. Often, she uses two-line stanzas, which, aligned in a poem’s spine, create a raft of spaces and lines that evoke a dangling rope ladder. My experience with these contraptions is that I detest every step I take on those unsteady rungs, but when I get down to the bottom, I look up and admire the beauty of the thing, and the tensile-then-slack ways of my once-consort. I often felt the same way about Manguso’s poetry, which is so footed in a personal vocabulary of emphasis and excogitation and reference that it can seem unmired and stakeless to a reader not privy to the writer’s emotional matrix. (However, Siste Viator does include a couple of pages of notes at the end, which include a number of fascinating nods.)

But Siste Viator means ‘stop, traveller’, and was a common inscription on Roman roadside tombs. Thus, Manguso invites our advertence to the monuments she has laid to her emotional remains and their targets: ‘I arrive and arrive. Look–I am the statue that thinks it’s running.’ Sometimes, this is literally death itself: ‘My favorite euphemism for death is the future … Will we never live together in the round house?’ In her ‘Address’ poems, the static nature of the published/memorialised poet is emphasised, and the reader bears witness to an explicit exchange between the poet and her target. Some rung-hopping from one of these unilateral calls, ‘Address on the Tenth Day’:

This morning all non-coffee energy comes from having slept in
your blue shirt.

Soon we will fly north and see a glacier: proof that poignancy
can be planned.

Before the needle (poignard) goes in, we must ride in an airplane,
but airplanes also are poignant. Liftoff: the moment that flying
stops being a metaphor.

These poems are often the embodiment of her Decay epiphany: occupy the lyric moment. Thus, they invoke modern equipment, scratch at immediate thoughts and grasp at fleeting mental possessions, bowerbird-like. Manguso is assiduous in occupying the moment. She documents the unexpected expansion of capacity in trying circumstances: ‘I am not asking to suffer less. / I hope to be nearly crucified.’ Relentless curiosity is a vital part of this documentation, perhaps as an aid to understanding, perhaps as part of a forging between the poet and the subject: ‘How long in a cold room will the tea stay hot?/ What about reality interests you? / How long can you live?’ Many of the poems in Siste Viator include the reader in their descriptive embrace, and my favourite are those powerful with vatic pronouncement:

Love not the rider but the old rider,
The ghost in the saddle: Obey that ghost.
A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip.
But we are not good horses.

But Manguso’s focus is sure, and at the end of Siste Viator, she reminds us what the spectacle of the lyric poet means for the reader:

I am not here to ruin you.
I am already in you.
I am the work you don’t do.
I am what you understand best and wordless.
I am with you in your chair and in your song.
…
Love me hard, pilgrim.

Read Manguso’s poem ‘Address to Winnie in Paris’ at The Best American Poetry blog.