Kindling Does for Firewood

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Kindling Does for Firewood is a novel by Australian writer Richard King, published by Allen & Unwin Academic (ISBN   978-1-86448-168-6). The novel, King's debut, won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1995. A review in Publishers Weekly states that the "clearly talented" author used experimental/stream-of-consciousness monologues. [1] The reviewer states that King "...aims for a flip tone in this debut chronicle of slackers in Melbourne, Australia". The review states that the romance between a female postsecondary student, Margaret and a male bookstore clerk, William, is "doomed from the start". Margaret is from a regular middle-class family, but Peter lives with unemployed roommates who only consume beer and drugs. The unemployed roommates are somewhat like the Lost Boys from the Peter Pan stories; King acknowledges the influence of the Peter Pan stories in his work. [2]

International Standard Book Number Unique numeric book identifier

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier which is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.

<i>Publishers Weekly</i>

Publishers Weekly (PW) is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling". With 51 issues a year, the emphasis today is on book reviews.

Paul Dawson, commenting on the Australian Vogel Awards, stated that the $20,000 award "...can be seen as a barometer of cultural preoccupations, mapping shifts at the edges of literary culture: here is where the direction of young writing appears to be moving, or at least where judges and publishers want it to move." Dawson states that "[i]t could be argued that Richard King's lightweight Kindling Does for Firewood was a safe option [for the Vogel Award givers] in the wake of the [Helen] Demidenko scandal in 1995." [3] The Helen Demidenko scandal involved her Vogel Award in 1993 for The Hand That Signed the Paper, "contributing to public debates about the responsibility of writing history". [4] The Hand that Signed the Paper is about a Ukrainian family trying to survive a decade of Stalinist purges and state-imposed poverty and famine. When the media discovered Helen Dale's identity and legal name, this promoted much debate on the nature of identity, ethnicity, and authenticity in Australian literature. [5] [6]

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Authenticity is a concept in psychology as well as existentialist philosophy and aesthetics. In existentialism, authenticity is the degree to which an individual's actions are congruent with their beliefs and desires, despite external pressures; the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures, and influences which are very different from, and other than, itself. A lack of authenticity is considered in existentialism to be bad faith. The call of authenticity resonates with the famous instruction by the Oracle of Delphi, “Know thyself.” But authenticity extends this message: "Don’t merely know thyself – be thyself."

Author

Richard King was born in Melbourne in 1968. He studied arts at Monash University, with a major in politics and philosophy. In addition to several plays, he wrote a second novel, Carrion Colony .

Carrion Colony is a novel by Australian author Richard King, published by Allen & Unwin. A reviewer in The Age called Carrion Colony an "altogether more ambitious work" than King's debut novel, Kindling Does for Firewood, a book which won Australia's Vogel Award in 1995. The reviewer calls Carrion Colony a "...kind of semi-allegorical, post-modernist account of the early days of colonial settlement, written in a highly idiosyncratic, jocularly vulgar style", almost as if it was "Australian history as viewed by Mad magazine." The reviewer states that "[t]ime and place are deliberately confused and conflated" and the prose is "...highly mannered", but with "arse jokes and puns aplenty". The reviewer states that the "...post-modernist element in the novel" can be seen in the "shifting sense of time and place but in the narrator's self-conscious intrusions". The reviewer calls it "willed, cerebral stuff". T

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References

  1. ↑ "Kindling Does for Firewood". www.publishersweekly.com. Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 3 January 2017.
  2. ↑ "Kindling Does for Firewood". www.publishersweekly.com. Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 3 January 2017.
  3. ↑ Dawson, Paul (April 2002). "The Artist is a Thief". www.textjournal.com.au. Text. Retrieved 3 January 2017. Vol 6 No 1
  4. ↑ Dawson, Paul (April 2002). "The Artist is a Thief". www.textjournal.com.au. Text. Retrieved 3 January 2017. Vol 6 No 1
  5. ↑ Egan, Susanna (October 2004). "The Company She Keeps: Demidenko and the problems of imposture in autobiography". Australian Literary Studies.
  6. ↑ Stewart, Ken (May 1997). "Those infernal pictures: reading Helen Darville, her novel and her critics". Australian Literary Studies.
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