Intimate Antipathies

IntimateAntipathiesis the much-anticipated new book by Luke Carman, the award-winning author ofthe cult classic An Elegant Young Man. The essays in this collectionfollow the writer in his oscillations through anxiety, outrage and ecstasy, andin the process explore the connections between writing and dreaming, writingand mental illness, writing and the complications of family life.

Fromhis famous jeremiad against arts administrators in 'Getting Square in a JerkingCircle', through the psychotic attack brought on by the collapse of hismarriage, to his surreal account of meeting with Gerald Murnane at a golf clubin the remote Victorian village of Goroke, Carman explores the particularchallenges faced by writers who grow up in the contested borderlands of thesuburbs - always returning to his great obsession, the home on a small mountainin Sydney's west, where his antipathies with the real world first began toshape his imagination.

LukeCarman's story collection An Elegant Young Man won the 2015 NSWPremier's New Writing Award and was shortlisted for the Australian LiteratureSociety Gold Medal, the Steele Rudd Short Story Prize and the Readings NewWriting Award. He was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelistfor the book, which is about a narrator, also named Luke, who bears manysimilarities to the essayist in this collection an outspoken and self-mockinginnocent who is beguiled by romance and yearns for transcendence.

'Somewherebetween swagger and sincerity...street poetry for contemporary Australia.' - MadeleineWatts, Sydney Morning Herald

'A bogan flaneur: part connoisseur, part anthropologist of the rich and fractious field of difference through which he moves.' - Geordie Williamson, Australian