ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Just in time to cheer readers fed up with a burst of rather bleak weather, comes a generous giveaway offer from the lovely people at the Grattan Street Press.  There are two copies of a short story collection called Mer, by debut author Samantha Amy Mansell up for grabs.

You’ve read about Grattan Street Press here before.  It’s an initiative of the University of Melbourne’s Publishing and Communications program in the School of Culture and Communication.  (I think that’s what we used to call the Faculty of Arts). Grattan Street Press is a start-up trade publisher based in Melbourne, and is staffed by graduate students, who receive hands-on experience of every aspect of the publishing process.  Bill at The Australian Legend has reviewed Ellen Davitt’s Force and Fraud, (1865), republished by Grattan Street in 2017 as part of their Colonial Australian Popular Fiction project to re-publish culturally valuable works that are out of print.  From the same collection, I’ve also got An Australian Girl in London by Louise Mack (2018, first published in1902), on the TBR.

But they also publish contemporary works, such as their most recent release, Mer, by Samantha Amy Mansell.  This is the blurb:

Set in an ominous underwater world marred by human destruction, the stories in Mer unsettle traditional mermaid mythology – beyond gender, beyond beauty, beyond romance. In her debut collection, Australian author Samantha Amy Mansell weaves a series of evocative tales about vengeance, loss and the right to survive. Mer asks not what, but who, lurks in the deep, depicting the ongoing damage to marine ecology from the viewpoint of the threatened merfolk.

Hayley Singer, a prominent author and academic working in the field of ecofeminism and feminist animal studies, describes Mer as a collection of “watery fables for toxic times”. These bold experimental stories will appeal to readers who are:

• Concerned with the alarming state of the climate catastrophe. Since 1995, the Great Barrier Reef has lost over half of its corals due to climate change. The UN warns that if global temperatures continue rising at the rate they are, 90% of the world’s corals will be wiped out. Mer plunges the reader into the reality of this imminent crisis, describing reefs and oceans that are overfished, littered with plastic, and choking from the ash of raging fires. Evocative and shocking, Mer will force readers to rethink their relationship with the environment.
• Disenfranchised by traditional gender binaries. Mer challenges the shell-bra-wearing mermaids and singing sirens of popular culture, and instead presents a cast of characters who subvert the traditional ideas of gender in mermaid mythology. In Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Ariel must give up her voice to be with her prince. Mer consciously gives back that voice.
• Interested in experimental literary fiction. Composed of five compelling short stories, Mer comes as “a unique contribution to the terrain of contemporary ecological fiction” (Hayley Singer). It belongs to the Grattan Street Shorts series.

Samantha Amy Mansell is a Sydney-based editor and writer. She is passionate about intersectional feminism, bisexual representation in literature, and creating fantastical worlds. Mer is her first book.

HOW TO ENTER

Interested? Please add your name to the comments below, and I’ll draw the winners at the end of next week.  All entries from readers with an Australian postcode for delivery will be eligible but it is a condition of entry that if you are the winner, you must contact me with a postal address by the deadline that will be specified in the blog post that announces the winner. (I’ll redraw if this deadline isn’t met). Your postal address will be forwarded to the publisher who will then send you the book.

Good luck everybody!