Gathered from the popular website www.StellaAwards.com, The True Stella Awards is an outrageous collection of America’s most frivolous lawsuits Named for Stella Liebeck, the woman who won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit after spilling hot McDonald’s coffee on herself, humorist Randy Cassingham’s popular website chronicles the hard-to-believe and amusing claims brought before the U.S.courts. The most ridiculous of these lawsuits are given the “honorable” Stella Award. In The True Stella Awards, Cassingham documents the most outlandish of these real-life cases, including: * The man who legally changed his name to Jack Ass, and then sued MTV because their TV show and movie Jackass infringed on his trademark and demeaned his “good name” * The songwriter who left a minute’s silence on his record only to be sued by the estate of another songwriter who copyrighted his own “silent” song * The man who sued an amusement park after being the victim of the ultimate “act of God”: He was hit by lightning while standing next to his own car in the parking lot Stunning and hilarious, The True Stella Awards reveals the extremes people will go to in the pursuit of “justice.”
Winner of the Stella Prize, 2014. The Eureka Stockade. It's one of Australia's foundation legends yet the story has always been told as if half the participants weren't there. But what if the hot-tempered, free-spirited gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons? What if there were women and children right there beside them, inside the Stockade, when the bullets started to fly? And how do the answers to these questions change what we thought we knew about the so-called 'birth of Australian democracy'? Who, in fact, were the midwives to that precious delivery? Ten years in the research and writing, irrepressibly bold, entertaining and often irreverent in style, Clare Wright's The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is a fitting tribute to the unbiddable women of Ballarat - women who made Eureka a story for us all. Clare Wright is an historian who has worked as a political speechwriter, university lecturer, historical consultant and radio and television broadcaster. Her first book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans, garnered both critical and popular acclaim and her second, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, won the 2014 Stella Prize. She researched, wrote and presented the ABC TV documentary Utopia Girls and is the co-writer of the four-part series The War That Changed Us which screened on ABC1. 'Lively, incisive and timely, Clare Wright's account of the role of women in the Eureka Stockade is an engrossing read. Assembling a tapestry of voices that vividly illuminate the hardscrabble lives endured on Ballarat's muddy goldfields, this excellent book reveals a concealed facet of one of Australia's most famous incidences of colonial rebellion. For once, Peter Lalor isn't the hero: it's the women who are placed front and centre...The Forgotten Rebels links the actions of its heroines to the later fight for female suffrage, and will be of strong relevance to a contemporary female audience. Comprehensive and full of colour, this book will also be essential reading for devotees of Australian history.' Bookseller and Publisher 'This is a wonderful book. At last an Australian foundation story where women are not only found, but are found to have played a fundamental role.' Chris Masters 'Brilliantly researched and fun to read. An exhilarating new take on a story we thought we knew.' Brenda Niall 'Fascinating revelations. Beautifully told.' Peter FitzSimons ‘The best source on women at Eureka.’ Big Smoke
"Disturbing and magical....with a grace and eloquence." - NPR Books "Full of lush, mesmerizing detail and keen insight into the easy intimacy between young girls which disappears with adulthood." -- The New Yorker "The Strays is a knowing novel, and beautifully done." -- Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Interestings For readers of Atonement, a hauntingly powerful story about the fierce friendship between three sisters and their friend as they grow up on the outskirts of their parents' wild and bohemian artistic lives. On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends Eva and her sisters Beatrice and Heloise, daughters of the infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. An only child from an unremarkable, working-class family, Lily has never experienced a household like the Trenthams'--a community of like-minded artists Evan and his wife have created, all living and working together to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930's Australia. And Lily has never met anyone like Eva, whose unabashed confidence and worldly knowledge immediately draw her in. Infatuated by the creative chaos of the Trenthams and the artists who orbit them, Lily aches to fully belong in their world, craving something beyond her own ordinary life. She becomes a fixture in their home, where she and Eva spend their days lounging in the garden, filching cigarettes and wine, and skirting the fringes of the adults' glamorous lives, who create scandalous art during the day and host lavish, debauched parties by night. But as seductive as the artists' utopian vision appears, behind it lies both darkness and dysfunction. And the further the girls are pulled in, the greater the consequences become. With elegance and vibrancy, The Strays evokes the intense bonds of girlhood friendships, the volatile undercurrents of a damaged family, and the yearning felt by an outsider looking in.
Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other. In the early 1700s, Sarah, accused of being a witch, flees for her life. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Ruth navigates a new house, a new husband and the strange waters of the local community. Six decades later, the house stands empty. Viv, mourning the death of her father, catalogues Ruth’s belongings and discovers her place in the past – and perhaps a way forward. Each woman’s choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men in their lives. But in sisterhood there is the hope of survival and new life. Intricately crafted and compulsively readable, The Bass Rock burns bright with anger and love.
“A Handmaid’s Tale for the 21st century” (Prism Magazine), Wood’s dystopian tale about a group of young women held prisoner in the Australian desert is a prescient feminist fable for our times. As the Guardian writes, “contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror.” Drugged, dressed in old-fashioned rags, and fiending for a cigarette, Yolanda wakes up in a barren room. Verla, a young woman who seems vaguely familiar, sits nearby. Down a hallway echoing loudly with the voices of mysterious men, in a stark compound deep in the Australian outback, other captive women are just coming to. Starved, sedated, the girls can't be sure of anything—except the painful episodes in their pasts that link them. Drawing strength from the animal instincts they're forced to rely on, the women go from hunted to hunters, along the way becoming unforgettable and boldly original literary heroines that readers will both relate to and root for. The Natural Way of Things is a lucid and illusory fable and a brilliantly plotted novel of ideas that reminds us of mankind's own vast contradictions—the capacity for savagery, selfishness, resilience, and redemption all contained by a single, vulnerable body. Winner 2016 Stella Prize 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Fiction An Australian Indie Best Fiction Book & Overall Book of the Year Winner Finalist 2017 International Dublin Literary Award 2016 Voss Literary Prize 2016 Victorian Premier's Award 2016 The Miles Franklin Award
Sam is full of questions on his first trip to the seashore and his older sister has an answer for each one, except whether or not Sam will ever come into the water.
Fifteen-year-old Monk drifts through a monotonous existence in a grimy Chinatown apartment with her “grumpy brown couch” of a dad, until she meets high school senior Santa Coy ([email protected]). For a moment, it looks like he might be her boyfriend. But when Monk's dad becomes obsessed with Santa Coy's artwork, Monk finds herself shunted to the sidelines as her father and the object of her affections begin to hatch a scheme of their own. To keep up, Monk must navigate a combustible cocktail of odd assignments, peculiar places, and murky underworld connections. In Jamie Marina Lau's debut novel, shortlisted for Australia's prestigious Stella Prize when she was nineteen years old, hazily surreal vignettes conjure a multifaceted world of philosophical angst and lackadaisical violence.
In the spirit of The Orphan Train and Before We Were Yours, a historical debut about a nurse who chooses to save a baby's life, and risks her own in the process, exploring the ties of motherhood and the little-known history of Coney Island and America's first incubators. A nurse's choice. A daughter's search for answers. New York City, 1926. Nurse Althea Anderson's heart is near breaking when she witnesses another premature baby die at Bellevue Hospital. So when she reads an article detailing the amazing survival rates of babies treated in incubators in an exhibit at Luna Park, Coney Island, it feels like the miracle she has been searching for. But the doctors at Bellevue dismiss Althea and this unconventional medicine, forcing her to make a choice between a baby's life and the doctors' wishes that will change everything. Twenty-five years later, Stella Wright is falling apart. Her mother has just passed, she quit a job she loves, and her marriage is struggling. Then she discovers a letter that brings into question everything she knew about her mother, and everything she knows about herself. The Light of Luna Park is a tale of courage and an ode to the sacrificial love of mothers.
A rare, original and stunning novel about a remarkable girl who learns the hard way that the truth doesn't always set you free - with echoes of Jasper Jones, Seven Little Australians and Cloudstreet. Shortlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize As a child, trapped in the savage act of growing up, Olive had sensed she was at the middle of something, so close to the nucleus she could almost touch it with her tongue. But like looking at her own nose for too long, everything became blurry and she had to pull away. She'd reached for happiness as a child not yet knowing that the memories she was concocting would become deceptive. That memories get you where they want you not the other way around. The setting is the Mallee, wide flat scrubland in north-western Victoria, country where men are bred quiet, women stoic and the gothic is never far away. Olive Lovelock has just turned twelve. She is smart, fanciful and brave and on the cusp of something darker than the small world she has known her entire life. She knows that adults aren't very good at keeping secrets and makes it her mission to uncover as many as she can. When she learns that she once had a baby sister who died - a child unacknowledged by her close but challenging family - Olive becomes convinced it was murder. Her obsession with the mystery and relentless quest to find out what happened have seismic repercussions for the rest of her family and their community. As everything starts to change, it is Olive herself who has the most to lose as the secrets she unearths multiply and take on complicated lives of their own. Little Gods is a novel about the mess of family, about vengeance and innocence lost. It explores resilience and girlhood and questions how families live with all of their complexities and contradictions. Resonating with echoes of great Australian novels like Seven Little Australians, Cloudstreet, and Jasper Jones, Little Gods is told with similar idiosyncrasy, insight and style. Funny and heartbreaking, this is a rare and original novel about a remarkable girl who learns the hard way that the truth doesn't always set you free.
Two sisters reckon with their toxic parents through the decline and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and with the care of their psychologically terrorized father, all relayed with dark humor and brutal honesty in this award-winning “brilliantly-written memoir... [that] reads like a novel” (best-selling author Margaret Atwood via Twitter). When her elderly mother is hospitalized unexpectedly, Vicki Laveau-Harvie and her sister travel to their parents' ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to help their father. Estranged from their parents for many years, they are horrified by what they discover on their arrival. For years their mother has camouflaged her manic delusions and savage unpredictability, and over the decades she has managed to shut herself and her husband away from the outside world, systematically starving him and making him a virtual prisoner in his own home. Rearranging their lives to be the daughters they were never allowed to be, the sisters focus their efforts on helping their father cope with the unending manipulations of their mother and encounter all the pressures that come with caring for elderly parents. And at every step they have to contend with their mother, whose favorite phrase during their childhood was: "I'll get you and you won't even know I'm doing it." Set against the natural world of the Canadian foothills ("in winter the cold will kill you, nothing personal"), this memoir—at once dark and hopeful—shatters precedents about grief, anger, and family trauma with surprising tenderness and humor.
