In 1944 the Australian literary world was rocked by a hoax which was to become a worldwide scandal. Ern Malley, deceased motor mechanic and poet, was the invention of two Sydney poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who were intent on proving that modern poetry was a sham. The work of Malley comprised lines and words selected randomly, everywhere from Shakespeare to an American report on the drainage of the breeding grounds of mosquitoes. Max Harris published the poetry in the literary magazine Angry Penguins but when the deception was revealed he was mercilessly lampooned, tried and convicted of publishing 'indecent advertisements'. This definitive edition contains all of the poems, a new introduction by artist Albert Tucker, and historical background by Max Harris, John Reed and Colin Wilson; augmented by the unique contribution of drawings and etchings by Garry Shead.

Following the triumph of his Booker Prize–winning True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey ventures into the Far East with a novel shot through with mysteries at once historical, literary, and personal. Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry magazine, had grown up knowing the famous and infamous John Slater. And because he figured prominently in the disaster that was her parents’ marriage, when Slater proposes that she accompany him to Malaysia, Sarah embarks out of curiosity on a journey that becomes, instead, a lifelong obsession. Her discoveries spiral outward from Christopher Chubb, a destitute Australian she meets by chance in the steamy, fetid city of Kuala Lumpur. He is mad, Slater warns her, explaining the ruinous hoax Chubb had committed decades earlier. But lurking behind the man’s peculiarity and arrogance, Sarah senses, is artistic genius, in the form of a manuscript he teases her with and which she soon would do anything to acquire. The provenance of this work, she gradually learns, is marked by kidnapping, exile, and death — a relentless saga that reaches from Melbourne to Bali, Sumatra, and Java, and that more than once compels her back to Malaysia without ever disclosing all of its secrets, only the power of the imagination and the price it can exact from those who would wield it. Astonishing, mesmerizing, and ultimately shocking, My Life as a Fake is the most audacious novel yet in Peter Carey’s extraordinary career.

Based on Australia's greatest literary hoax, Sincerely, Ethel Malley explores the nature of creativity, and human frailty. It drips with the anaemic blood of Australian literature, the gristle of a culture we've

In October 1943, the young and successful Australian literary editor, Max Harris, received a package of poems by a recently deceased poet, Ern Malley, forwarded to him by his sister Ethel. Convinced he had hit upon the work of a Modernist genius, a poet of whom Australia could be proud, Harris published Malley's poems in his magazine, Angry Penguins. With copies despatched around the world and grand claims surrounding publication, Harris had no idea of the events that lay in store; the consequences of which would haunt the literary landscape for generations. Michael Heyward's compelling account of perhaps the most famous literary hoax of the twentieth century reproduces in their entirety, the seventeen poems published as 'The Darkening Ecliptic' in the magazine, Angry Penguins. 'As Michael Heyward explains in his exceptional book . . . the Ern Malley affair dramatises, more luridly than any other literary episode, the question which is in the minds of the audience of any work of modern art; the question of whether what they're being invited to admire is, in fact, in some sense, fake.' John Lanchester, Guardian 'A thoroughly researched narrative of the whole saga . . . tells the story very well indeed, with wit and style.' Ian Hamilton, Times Literary Supplement

'Native speakers' and 'native users' are playing the same game, sharing, as they do, the model of the Standard Language.