Read Online The Best Australian Stories by Black Inc. - Free Book Online Page A

literature’s hot. And important too.’
    A couple of visiting literary agents took a similar view: ‘There’s a lot of polished writing around,’ one of them said. ‘You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out?’ She tag-teamed to her colleague, who answered slowly as though intoning a mantra, ‘Your background and life experience .’
    Other friends were more forthright: ‘I’m sick of ethnic lit,’ one said. ‘It’s full of descriptions of exotic food.’ Or: ‘You can’t tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn’t have the vocab.’
    I was told about a friend of a friend, a Harvard graduate from Washington, D.C., who had posed in traditional Nigerian garb for his book-jacket photo. I pictured myself standing in a rice paddy, wearing a straw conical hat. Then I pictured my father in the same field, wearing his threadbare fatigues, young and hard-eyed.
    â€˜It’s a licence to bore,’ my friend said. We were drunk and wheeling our bikes because both of us, separately, had punctured our tyres on the way to the party.
    â€˜The characters are always flat, generic. As long as a Chinese writer writes about Chinese people, or a Peruvian writer about Peruvians , or a Russian writer about Russians …’ he said, as though reciting children’s doggerel, then stopped, losing his train of thought. His mouth turned up into a doubtful grin. I could tell he was angry about something.
    â€˜Look,’ I said, pointing at a floodlit porch ahead of us. ‘Those guys have guns.’
    â€˜As long as there’s an interesting image or metaphor once in every this much text’ – he held out his thumb and forefinger to indicate half a page, his bike wobbling all over the sidewalk. I nodded to him, and then I nodded to one of the guys on the porch, who nodded back. The other guy waved us through with his faux-wood air rifle. A car with its headlights on was idling in the driveway, and girls’ voices emerged from inside, squealing, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’
    â€˜Faulkner, you know,’ my friend said over the squeals, ‘he said we should write about the old verities. Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.’ A sudden sharp crack behind us, like the striking of a giant typewriter hammer, followed by some muffled shrieks. ‘I know I’m a bad person for saying this,’ my friend said, ‘but that’s why I don’t mind your work, Nam. Because you could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time. Like in your third story.’
    He must have thought my head was bowed in modesty, but in fact I was figuring out whether I’d just been shot in the back of the thigh. I’d felt a distinct sting. The pellet might have ricocheted off something.
    â€˜You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead , you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans – and New York painters with haemorrhoids.’
    For a dreamlike moment I was taken aback. Catalogued like that, under the bourbon stink of his breath, my stories sank into unflattering relief. My leg was still stinging. I imagined sticking my hand down the back of my jeans, bringing it to my face under a streetlight, and finding it gory, blood-spattered. I imagined turning around, advancing wordlessly up the porch steps, and dropkicking the two kids. I would tell my story into a microphone from a hospital bed. I would compose my story in a county cell. I would kill one of them, maybe accidentally, and never talk about it, ever, to anyone. There was no hole in my jeans.
    â€˜I’m probably a bad person,’ my friend said, stumbling beside his bike a few steps in front of me.
    If you ask me why I came to Iowa, I would say that Iowa is beautiful in the way that any place is beautiful: if