Brian Castro NEWS
Come to a day-long seminar featuring readings and dialogue with Transpacific Mixed Race authors Brian Castro (Shanghai Dancing, Kaya Press), Kien Nguyen, and Paisley Rekdal presented by the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. The seminar will address these questions: “How do Transpacific mixed-race authors inscribe and represent their heritage in their artistic representations? […]
From South Asian Kenyans struggling under the threat of expulsion, to Samoan girls on the cusp of womanhood, to a word-obsessed, multiracial Aussie piecing together his family’s past through fragments of letters and half-forgotten stories. The characters found in Kaya Press books are as provocative and nuanced as the writers who give them voice. Celebrate […]
The Garden Book
Brian Castro’s award-winning novel, The Garden Book, is a meditation on loneliness, addiction and exploitation. Set in the years between the Depression and the Second World War in Australia’s Dandenong Ranges, it follows the emotionally turbulent life of the beautiful Swan Hay (born Shuang He)–her marriage to the passionate yet brutal Darcy Damon, her love affair with the aviator Jasper Zenlin and her rise to literary fame overseas after her poetry is translated into French without her knowledge. Fifty years after her disappearance into institutions and a life of poverty and despair, Norman Shih–a rare-book librarian and “expert in self-effacement”–begins to piece together the life and losses of Swan. Tracking down clues from guesthouse libraries, antiquarian bookshops and Swan’s own haunted writings, Shih fills out a portrait of early twentieth-century Australian lives wracked by modernist impulses of racial prejudice.
praise
“The Garden Book is another triumph of intelligence and imagination by one of the most exacting, yet rewarding of Australian novelists, and when the mood is on him, one of the most amusing as well.” — Peter Pierce, The Age
“The richness of the novel lies not only in the tormented, satisfyingly circular love story but in the skillful patterning and echoing of events and the questing, thrusting, interlacing ideas, often manifesting as bold concatenations or dazzling puns that connect love, lies, writing, reading and, in this novel, leaves.” — Katharine England, Advertiser
“Castro’s work is all the more notable for its intelligence, humour and daring. There are many fine writers in Australia, but few who are prepared to wrestle so intensely with the limits of the expressible.” — James Ley, Sydney Morning Herald
“Brian Castro is one of the most innovative and challenging novelists writing in English today.” — Bernadette Brennan
Brian Castro NEWS
Come to a day-long seminar featuring readings and dialogue with Transpacific Mixed Race authors Brian Castro (Shanghai Dancing, Kaya Press), Kien Nguyen, and Paisley Rekdal presented by the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. The seminar will address these questions: “How do Transpacific mixed-race authors inscribe and represent their heritage in their artistic representations? […]
From South Asian Kenyans struggling under the threat of expulsion, to Samoan girls on the cusp of womanhood, to a word-obsessed, multiracial Aussie piecing together his family’s past through fragments of letters and half-forgotten stories. The characters found in Kaya Press books are as provocative and nuanced as the writers who give them voice. Celebrate […]
