Birch, Tony. Shadowboxing

Description

Shadowboxing
by Tony Birch.

Scribe, Carlton North, 2006.
First Edition paperback.

Birch’s first collection of short stories on growing up Indigenous in working-class Fitzroy.

‘Tony Birch’s fiction is part of a recent revival of the longstanding Australian tradition of social realism that is concerned with everyday lives of working class (and now welfare class) characters. While its origins lie in the late nineteenth century, and it was prominent in the 1930s in the work of Katharine Susannah Prichard and others… Birch’s fiction, like that of Christos Tsiolkas, is concerned with contemporary Australian formations of class. More specifically, in concert with Kalinda Ashton and Maxine Beneba Clarke’s recent debut Foreign Soil (2014), it concerns itself with lives lived on Australia’s social and economic margins. Where his historical scholarship disturbs colonial myths of ‘settlement’, questioning national narratives that tell of modernity, productivity and progress, his fiction unsettles a pervasive and related myth: that of social equality’ (Eve Vincent, Sydney Review of Books, 11 July, 2014.).

Condition: Cover is in very good condition. Pages tanned. Otherwise unmarked and in very good condition.