Claire Conrad and everyone at Janklow & Nesbit, Ben Ball, Siobhán Cantrill and the Simon & Schuster team, Nicholas Jose, Brian Castro and the writing community at the University of Adelaide, the Norman Mailer Centre in Provincetown, the Residencia Internacional de Arte Can Serrat, Varuna the Writers’ House in Katoomba, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Luke Carr, Geraldine Hakewill, Kyra Henley, Tessa Khan, Jonathan Pearlman, Nadia Rosenman, Laura Scrivano and Andrew Nolan.

Earlier versions of the story ‘How is your great life?’ appeared in Meanjin and Black Inc’s Best Australian Stories 2015.

The landscapes and skyscapes of the Mars-like planet in ‘Day Zero’ were informed by Sean McMahon’s writings, especially the essay, ‘The aesthetic objection to terraforming Mars,’ which appeared in James SJ Schwartz and Tony Milligan (eds), The Ethics of Space Exploration (Springer, Switzerland, 2016), pp. 209–218. All errors and liberties are my own.

Quotation Sources

Sources for the quotations in the stories are as follows:

1. p. 16: Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (Modern Library, New York, 2005), pp. 4 and 35.
2. p. 33: Dr Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (Random House, New York, 1985), p. 18.
3. p. 87: William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1.
4. p. 94: Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1967), p. 1.
5. p. 101: Quotations adapted from Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 435–450 at pp. 438–9, 441. Used with the permission of Thomas Nagel.
6. pp. 150, 157: Various lines from the untitled Anton Chekhov play known as Platonov, written in 1878 and first published in 1923, as translated by David Hare in Young Chekhov: Platonov; Ivanov; The Seagull (Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury, 2015).
7. p. 158: Thomas Mann, in the essay, ‘Versuch ueber Tschechow’, originally published in Sinn und Form in 1954, as quoted in The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories, trans. Peter Constantine (Seven Stories Press, New York, 1998), p. xvii.
8. p. 160: Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Music, when soft voices die’, in Mary Shelley (ed), Posthumous Poems (John and Henry L. Hunt, London, 1824), p. 214.
9. p. 178: William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (John Calder, London, 1982), p. 3.
10. p. 183: Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, in Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1956), p. 9.
11. p. 186: Joke attributed to Dorothy Parker in Paul Hammond and Patrick Hughes, Upon the Pun: Dual Meaning in Words and Pictures (W. H. Allen, London, 1978), p. 4.
12. p. 285: This extract is reproduced from Joëlle Gergis, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2018), p. 102.

Born in Wollongong, Jo Lennan studied in Sydney and Oxford. She has worked as a lawyer and writer, contributing to The Economist, 1843, Time Magazine and The Monthly. Her work has featured in the Best Australian Stories and Best Australian Essays anthologies.