Books published by Reading Sideways Press

The poems that comprise Indonesian poet, artist, and playwright Afrizal Malna's 2013 collection Document Shredding Museum address a variety of histories and the present moments they both inform and deform. From intimate encounters between lovers and friends to mass scale environmental and semantic destruction, from classical Javanese myth to colonial and postcolonial corporate pillaging of human and natural resources, these poems dismantle and reassemble the debris of language, asking how we can make poetry from such ruins. Drawing on a wide array of modes and moods, and colored always by Afrizal's characteristic complex of darkness, humor, and insight into the conditions of the present, Document Shredding Museum troubles the boundaries between information and experience, emotion and thought.

What is our relation to the land? How do we create and foster community? What happens when the social glue that keeps us together starts to dissipate and ties began to weaken?Scott Pearce's debut novel, faded yellow by the winter, explores the tensions that arise in the farming town of Henrithvale: a small, but once prosperous town of north western Victoria. The novel's lead character, Vic, struggles in his bids to save the footy club, his family's inter-generational apple orchards while seemingly losing a grip on his relationships with his wife and daughters.faded yellow by the winter is an accomplished debut from a writer who draws on a vast array of references and styles. The novel helps to call into question farming practices which are over-reliant on water as well as outdated modes of masculinity. The novel hints at unresolved conflicts between First Nations and Settler Australians.This novel is more than just a 'footy novel' and 'regional Australia' novel: it is part realist, part magic-realist, and part-Western. Pearce's novel reflects and engages with some of the many unresolved tensions so many of us would rather ignore."A social realist novel about one of our most biting realities - the withering of rural Australia; its farmlands, its towns and its footy clubs." Martin Flanagan"This is a story of football heroes and dying women. It is also a ghost story, in which the traditions of patriarchy haunt a family and a country town. Writing prose rich with the poetic and the Australian vernacular, Scott Pearce is an exciting new voice in Australian literature. He has written a novel that is uniquely ours and uniquely for our times." Maria Takolander