Every year, Sleepers assembles a motley crue of new and established (but mostly new - mostly never heard of) writers for their critically acclaimed collection of short fiction (with occasional miscellany): The Sleepers Almanac. This year sees new stories from people the eds had previously not heard of, including the incredibly talented likes of Isabelle Li and Julie Koh. But there are names that might be familiar, too, to those who love short stories: Brad Bryant, Pierz Newton-John, or Sian Prior, perhaps better known for her journalism, but proving that she knows how to wrangle a story too. What makes the Almanac different is its breadth. The Almanac, which focuses on new and emerging authors, is the result of a slush-pile read, where writers from all over the country have been encouraged to send in stories up to 10,000 words long.

Todd Hearon’s haunting debut collection chronicles the twin paths of isolation and desire in the search for meaning and union with others. On his pilgrimage through the lost worlds of earth and the soul, the speaker encounters drought in both the literal and spiritual sense as he confronts desolate landscapes, from the brown remnants of ruined cities, to the depths of the human heart and man’s capacity for utter destruction. Yet even though he frequently encounters darkness, he never ceases to seek beauty. He is a man who wears many faces, from Adam, staring down a bleak future bereft of Paradise, to the doomed poet Shelley, drowned off the coast of Italy. He speaks as a man adrift in his own life, seeking an answer to his emptiness, an estranged traveler through memory and longing. Lyrical and intense, Strange Land is a quest for understanding and human connection. Strange Land It goes without saying a word: the world under cover of midnight snow, what we have known of pageantry and lilac, leaf and song subsumed in starless silence. Waking at dawn into the tremulous blue of the room, as in earth’s afterglow, we lie, lidless, listening, as crows call out the ear’s horizons. What year is it? Into what country were we born and now must make our way? Outside the pane the stillness feels ancestral but the ghosts not yours, not mine. My émigré, we are cut off. An ocean to the east churns in chiaroscuro while unseen ranges to the south deflect our passage, what passage might have been. This country seems the passing of a dream to a moonscape’s still immitigable white, a land’s amnesia where against the sky three needling black birds fly and slip like an ellipsis out of sight.

'The Weight of a Human Heart' turns the rules of storytelling on their head. A series of graphs illustrates the disintegration of a marriage, step by excruciating step. A literary feud, and an affair, play out in the book review section of a national newspaper. A young girl learns her mother's disturbing secrets.

A biting collection of stories from a bold new voice. A young girl sees ghosts from her third eye, located where her belly button should be. A corporate lawyer feels increasingly disconnected from his job in a soulless 1200-storey skyscraper. And a one-dimensional yellow man steps out from a cinema screen in the hope of leading a three-dimensional life, but everyone around him is fixated only on the color of his skin. Welcome to Portable Curiosities. In these dark and often fantastical stories, Julie Koh combines absurd humour with searing critiques on modern society, proving herself to be one of Australia's most original and daring young writers.

In Thought Crimes, Tim Richards takes the reader on a mind - bending ride through a world where nothing is quite as it seems. The lives these stories describe are almost ordinary - but an ambush lurks around every corner. A novice teacher accepts a job at an unconventional high school where students take 'self - expression' to odd and disturbing lengths. In a trendy beachside suburb, suspiciously perfect babies start appearing on young couples' doorsteps. A visitor from the future shakes the life out of a small Australian town. Blackly funny and irresistibly twisted, these stories peek behind the everyday appearance of things to explore unspoken fears and desires. Destined to become a cult classic, Thought Crimes is a one - way trip through the looking glass. Irresistibly inventive stories from a master of the satirical twist.