It's November. I AM GETTING EXCITED ABOUT ADELAIDE WRITERS' WEEK! Running 27 Feb - 3 Mar, it's literary love under tall trees in long grass. It's storytelling and talking about storytelling. It's a book tent of a thousand novels. Yes. Yesyesyesyes. There's a gazillion authors being shipped to Adelaide, but here are the ones I'm sah essited for! Patrick deWitt
His second novel, The Sisters Brothers, was crude, absurd, and somehow IRONIC WHILE BEING HEARTWARMING. How can that happen? It's like deWitt changed the physics of the proton and neutron and decided that things that are seemingly opposite to each other can unite. He'll be promoting his latest novel, Undermajordomo Minor. And well. I just have imagined that this man will be a weird and strange festival guest. Charlotte Wood Pretty much everyone I know and admire (ie female writers around the country) have been writing on Facebook posts how Wood's latest, The Natural Way of Thing, shook them to their core and they are still thinking about it while walking with their kids to the playground, on the bus, cooking dinner. While this sounds intimidating and also scary (in the book, women are punished for perceived sexual sins), it also shows that the author is fuck-off awesome for delving into the darkness to discover greater truths about humanity (kind of like Roxane Gay in Untamed State). Also, she has like a treehouse writing shed. If that doesn't make Charlotte Wood the coolest writer in Australia rn, I'm not sure what will. Masha Gessen HelooOOO! The woman who is a LGBT rights activist in RUSSIA? Who deconstructed the men who were behind the Boston Bombings? Whose journalism cuts to the core? Two words. Yes. Please. So. I will see you there.