The Victoria Principle

(Paperback)

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Michael Farrell is a highly regarded Australian poet, whose poems are remarkable for their surreal images, their sensitivity to language, and recently, for their story-telling qualities. In his new collection The Victoria Principle, Farrell turns from poems to short stories, to give full range to the thoughts that drive his writing.

The stories often begin with a curious subject or connection the fear of birds, a nude writing retreat in Nova Scotia, Nirvana's song 'Smells like Teen Spirit' and a boiled egg, or the study of metaphysics in the Middle Ages and the early death of singer-songwriter Andy Gibb. They then proceed by a series of elaborations to unpack the associations that have gathered in the writer's mind. The associations may appear strange or even absurd, but the process has its own logic we may think of these fictions as 'thought stories' rather than short stories.

Beneath their playful surface, they engage deep emotions, about the writer's family, his Catholic background, his life as a gay man, his writing and his nervous breakdown, with its attendant phobias, depression and hospitalisation. Here fiction's collision with memoir produces not only auto- or meta-fictions, but also ridges of the metaliterary: metacriticism; metapoetics.

Author Bio

Michael Farrell's previous collections published by Giramondo include open sesame, shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Poetry; Cocky's Joy, shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry; I Love Poetry, which won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award; Family Trees; and Googlecholia, longlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. He edited the anthology Ashbery Mode for TinFish, and has published a scholarly monograph with Palgrave Macmillan, Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 17961945.