1987. The Philippine government fights a total war against insurgency. The village of Iraya is militarised. The days are violent and the nights heavy with fireflies in the river where the dead are dumped. With her twelve-metre hair, Estrella, the Fish-hair Woman, trawls corpses from the water that tastes of lemon-grass. She falls in love with the Australian Tony McIntyre who disappears in the conflict. Ten years later, his son travels to Manila to find his father. From the Philippines to Australia, Hawai'i, to evocations of colonial Spain, this transnational novel spins a dark, epic tale. Its storytelling is expansive, like the heart -- How much can the heart accommodate? ... Only four chambers but with infinite space like memory, where there is room even for those whom we do not love.

Alternately mythic, wistful, and quirky, this short story anthology resonates with an original and confident storytelling voice. An anomalous kiss, a white turtle ferrying the dreams of the dead, a working siesta in a five-star hotel, a woman's 12-meter hair trawling corpses from a river, and a queue of longings in Sydney: these are some of the subjects of the 23 enigmatic tales brimming with chance and hope.

Southeast Asian Ecocriticism presents a timely exploration of the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism through its devotion to the writers, creators, theorists, traditions, concerns, and landscapes of Southeast Asian countries. While ecocritics have begun to turn their attention to East and South Asian contexts and, particularly, to Chinese and Indian cultural productions, less emphasis has been placed on the diverse environmental traditions of Southeast Asia. Building on recent scholarship in Asian ecocriticism, the book gives prominence to the range of theoretical models and practical approaches employed by scholars based within, and located outside of, the Southeast region. Consisting of twelve chapters, Southeast Asian Ecocriticism includes contributions on the ecological prose, poetry, cinema, and music of Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. The authors emphasize the transnational exchanges of materials, technologies, texts, motifs, and ideas between Southeast Asian countries and Australia, England, Taiwan (Formosa), and the United States. From environmental hermeneutics, postcolonial studies, indigenous studies, and ecofeminism to critical plant studies, ecopoetics, and ecopedagogy, the edited collection embodies the dynamic breadth of interdisciplinary environmental scholarship today. Southeast Asian Ecocriticism foregrounds the theories, practices, and prospects of ecocriticism in the region. The volume opens up new directions and reveals fresh possibilities not only for ecocritical scholarship in Southeast Asia but for a comparative environmental criticism that transcends political boundaries and national canons. The volume highlights the important role of literature in heightening awareness of ecological issues at local, regional, and global scales.

The fear and violence that followed the events of September 11, 2001 touched lives all around the world, even in places that few would immediately associate with the global war on terror. In At the Limits of Justice, twenty-nine contributors from six countries explore the proximity of terror in their own lives and in places ranging from Canada and the United States to Jamaica, Palestine/Israel, Australia, Guyana, Chile, Pakistan, and across the African continent. In this collection, female scholars of colour – including leading theorists on issues of indigeneity, race, and feminism – examine the political, social, and personal repercussions of the war on terror through contributions that range from testimony and poetry to scholarly analysis. Inspired by both the personal and the global impact of this violence within the war on terror, they expose the way in which the war on terror is presented as a distant and foreign issue at the same time that it is deeply present in the lives of women and others all around the world. An impassioned but rigorous examination of issues of race and gender in contemporary politics, At the Limits of Justice is also a call to create moral communities which will find terror and violence unacceptable.

Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans. Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by CA. Cranston and Robert Zeller, Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, and Cary Wolfe. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.

This book is the first to examine gender and violence in Australian literature. It argues that literary texts by Australian women writers offer unique ways of understanding the social problem of gendered violence, bringing this often private and suppressed issue into the public sphere. It draws on the international field of violence studies to investigate how Australian women writers challenge the victim paradigm and figure women’s agencies. In doing so, it provides a theoretical context for the increasing number of contemporary literary works by Australian women writers that directly address gendered violence, an issue that has taken on urgent social and political currency. By analysing Australian women’s literary representations of gendered violence, this book rethinks victimhood and agency, particularly from a feminist perspective. One of its major innovations is that it examines mainstream Australian women’s writing alongside that of Indigenous and minoritised women. In doing so it provides insights into the interconnectedness of Australia’s diverse settler, Indigenous and diasporic histories in chapters that examine intimate partner violence, violence against Indigenous women and girls, family violence and violence against children, and the war and political violence.

The author chronicles the evolution of Philippine literature simultaneously in terms of medium (English) and gender (women). In addition, she proposes hypotheses regarding the whys and wherefores of this specific segment of our literature.

Fiction. Asian American Studies. Originally published in Australia under the title White Turtle, this collection of short stories by established Filipina writer Merlinda Bobis offers bold and lyrical explorations of postcolonial Filipino experience, at once epic in scope and intimate in detail. Merlinda Bobis, author of plays, poetry, and fiction, writes in both English and Filipino and lives in Australia. THE KISSING won the National Book Award for fiction from the Manila Critics Circle. Bobis has the rare ability to make poetry out of politics. In her work, the graceful use of metaphor becomes a formidable weapon, blasting escape routes out of stories of poverty and oppression -- Rachel Cunneen, Amida Magazine. ** Call to check inventory before ordering.

Offers teachers, students, and general readers a fascinating glimpse into the Filipina diaspora.

A series of ten interconnected stories follows the life and loves of Elly Fisher.