Will Jason King ever charm the young rider Jenni Cahill and gain long-anticipated access to her jodhpurs? Part of the Storycuts series, this story was previously published in the collection If You Liked School, You'll Love Work.

Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, is up to his old tricks with his new work of transgressive short fiction. Irvine Welsh's first short-story collection since his debut work The Acid House presents five extraordinary stories, which remind us that he is a master of the short form, a brilliant storyteller, and—unarguably—one of today's funniest and most subversive writers. In "Rattlesnakes" three young Americans, lost in the desert, are accosted by two armed Mexicans. A Korean chef and a Chicago socialite find themselves connected through the disappearance of a pooch named Toto in "The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park." And in the title story, Mickey Baker—an ex-pat English bar owner living on the Costa Brava—tries to keep all of his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid's weight at the sexual maximum, attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his ex-wife and Spanish gangsters. In typically Welshian fashion, the characters and settings are anything but typical. These stories will make you laugh and gasp.

"This book tells the story of four men - L.F.Giblin, J.B. Brigden, D.B.Copland, and Roland Wilson - who, in 1920s Tasmania, formed a personal and intellectual bond that was to prove a pivot of economic thought, policy-making and institution-building in mid-century Australia."--p. ix.

In a series of entertaining essays, this wide-ranging book looks at the impact of the media on Australian life and politics, and anlyses key images and stories that shape our perceptions at century's end. Topics include Americanisation, feminism, pop, pay TV, the Internet, political correctness, Mabo, and the republican convention.

Presents a fictionalized account of the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia.

Everything's Fucked. Anyone alive today can tell you that. But not as sublimely, sumptuosly or seductively as Triple J's gorgeous postmodern Goddess of Nihilism, the disenchanted, permanently adolescent and just plain cross HELEN RAZER. And why is everything fucked? Because of Deepak Chopra, that's why. He and the rest of the execrable New Age movement have just gone too far. Incense, chakras, yurts, rattan shopping bags, angel therapists, John Gray, Louise Hay ... none of them are a path to lasting peace. All that namby-pamby self-discovery and New Age Orthodoxy be buggered. Have you ever considered the possibility that the multibillion dollar self-help industry is actually a plot hatched somewhere in a dank, humourless corner of the Pentagon, designed entirely to keep you dirt poor, overburdened with doubt and stupid enough to actually enjoy programs such as 'Hey! Hey! It's Saturday?'? Well, darn it, it's occurred to me! And that is why, in a perverse spirit of generousity, I have decided to rake the detritus from the crazy paving we recognise as human endevour and forge a trajectory toward the One Truth: everything's fucked. Petulance and hate are the only antidote in this postmodern world. All things are shithouse, and thankfully we have the curvaceously cranky Helen Razer to provide us with a starter kit of fucked things to think about to ease our way forward to embittered recovery. Hate can be deeply rewarding. Especially when directed at gaudy prepubescent female frock-shop attendants. Or crypto-fascist computer store Billy Gates wannabes. All you need is Helen's Never Fail Five Point Plan for Twarting Shitheads: Hate. Read. Flounce. Recount your hates. And never trust a hippie. If you've been overcome by the cloying synthetic honey-love of the New Age and hate doesn't come as naturally to you as it once did, Helen is on had with a few suggestions for recognising dissonance, vacuity and scum. Like Demi Moore. Alcoholic soft drinks. Gourmet pizza. And of course 'Hey! Hey! It's Saturday.' Once you've got the hang of karmically imbalanced hate, it's time to acquire Protracted Adolescence Disorder. This dysfunction publicly evinced by such luminaries as Bill Gates, Jerry Seinfeld and Courtney Love, is virulent and may be financially perilous. Malapert owners of factory-fresh newborns may naively expect to extricate themselves from toxic parental bondage in, perhaps, twenty years. PAD ensures beyond doubt that in the year 2029 you'll have a wingeing, procrastinating, shop-soiled thirty-two year old still begging you for money and leaving their (Mambo) clothes on the bathroom floor. To be the perfect postmodern princess, you must of course abandon gender to the revolution. And if you churlishly refuse to follow any of Helen's other extravagantly researched paradigms for self-awareness and change, well, you must, you simply cannot afford not to, crossdress. For those few of you needing them, tips on exacting extreme gender travesty are forthcoming. For gentlemen: Cry. Experience PMT. Depilate. Meddle. Envelop. For ladies: Fiddle. Nudity. Let fluffy off the chain. Drink beer. Gamble. Ladies, you must learn to fiddle. Do not fiddle with the frustrated, poignant desire of a convent girl who knows what she's doing is wrong in the eyes of the Lord. As much as it may be an exhibitionist pleasure to masturbate in the presence of an important deity, stop it at once. Be more nonchalant. Remember that an ill-gotten climax is not your objective. Perform irresolute origami with your nether folds. Disrobe not with the urgency of a motley Kings Cross fan dancer but the the comic integrity of an ample, gangling male sports-ground streaker. Fart not with the repressed denial and pain of a Tory politician who is paddled by a buxom madam in cloying weekly privacy. Fart with the loud avuncular dignity of an adipose publican. Drink beer not with the tentative chagrin of a shandy-sipping befrocked matron. Imbibe it instead with the gusto

"The author's capacity to grasp and interpret these [world media] events is astounding, and her ability to provide insights into a world where unbounded information is circling the earth with the speed of light is startling." -- Choice "... a wide-ranging, quirky and dextrous mix of description, theory and analysis, that documents the perils of the global telecommunications network... " -- Times Literary Supplement "... this is a stimulating, even moving, book, dense with ideas and with many quotable lines." -- The New Statesman "Wark is one of the most original and interesting cultural critics writing today." -- Lawrence Grossberg McKenzie Wark writes about the experience of everyday life under the impact of increasingly global media vectors. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. We no longer have origins, we have terminals.

McKenzie Wark, one of Australia's most exciting cultural commentators, takes a fresh look at recent debates about gender, race, culture and the media and suggests that our sense of national identity no longer resides in our past but is continually being reinvented.

Here are seventeen original short stories that reflect young adults' views on friendships and prejudice, expectations and disappointments, and connections and confrontations.