Back Burning [Paperback]

Sylvia Petter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2007

Winner, IP Picks 2007, Best Fiction Sylvia Petter s collection flings the reader across the globe in its bold exploration of love, death, passion, relationship, and family. Echoing her own life experience, Sylvia Petter s award-winning stories explore universal themes through lenses of distance and separation. Back Burning spans continents, zooming in on snapshots of relationships from childhood and young love, through adulthood and career, political pursuits and history, to awakening in old age. Powerful stories of loss and rejuvenation emerge from this patchwork in unexpected ways. I want to tell them about timing, how a new fire can burn once an old one has died. I also want to tell them about back burning and fires that are lit to quell bigger flames.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Sylvia Petter is a cartographer of dislocated lives. With compassionate precision, she charts the detours, the disruptive incursions of passion, loneliness and loss, the ever-shifting conceptions of home and of the self. Her characters are always on the move through complicated terrain, and the journey is richly rewarding for the reader. --Janette Turner Hospital

In simple, direct and compelling language, the stories reward the reader with a variety of distinct and memorable experiences: from the complexities of love (and unfaithfulness) to those of history and the way it treats, mistreats and selects its victims, building its ironies on the accidents of race, nationality, personality, place and parentage. With its broad geographical span and array of venues, this book would make a fine companion for a journey. Not only does it entertain; it makes you think, it makes you feel, it makes you appreciate the humanity of its many characters. --Thomas E. Kennedy, Advisory Editor, The Literary Review

Sylvia Petter s second collection is storytelling at its best. Each story presents a mini-world complete in itself with real-to-life characters, heart-aching situations, and visions of wings . Petter takes the reader for a fast moving, eclectic tour around Europe, and back and forth to Australia. Crossing cultures with every page, and shifting between generations, Petter slowly builds a world of human goodness and trust in the midst of shadows. The reader is won over by Petter s sharp wit, polished craft and honesty. Bravo for this tour de force. --Susan M. Tiberghien, author of One Year to a Writing Life

About the Author

Sylvia Petter was born in 1949 in Vienna and grew up in Australia. She graduated in 1969 with a BA from the University of NSW and studied translation at the University of Vienna. She began writing fiction in the early nineties, participating in online writing workshops, and received a mentorship through the NSW Writers Centre to work on her first novel. She also worked with Wayson Choy at a workshop of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto and was mentored by Timothy Findley and Peter Carey through the Humber Correspondence Programme. She has read and given papers at conferences of the Society for the Study of the Short Story in English, notably in New Orleans in 2002 and Alcala de Henares, Spain, in 2004. For ten years, she was a member of the Geneva Writers Group and contributed actively to the organisation of the biennial Geneva Writers Conference where she participated in workshops with Susan Tiberghien, Thomas E. Kennedy, David Applefield, Peter Ho Davies, Lee Gutkind, and others, and served on panels. Her stories have been published widely online and in print, and have been mentioned in The Economist (UK) and Archipelago (US). Several of her stories and articles have been published in ESL reading material through Lynx Publishing, Canada. Her first collection of stories, The Past Present, was published by IUMIX Ltd, UK, in 2001 in print and electronic formats. Sylvia is currently a postgraduate student in Creative Writing at the University of NSW with the critical part of her thesis concentrating on the stories of Janette Turner Hospital. The creative component is a novel entitled Ambergris. She has given papers related to her research at conferences and colloquia in Montreal, Dijon, Cornwall and Alcala de Henares. Translations into French of her stories are forthcoming in 2007 in Création au feminin: filiations, Dijon, EUD, and Correspondances océanienes, New Caledonia. Under the pseudonym, AstridL, she also writes erotica; five stories will be appearing in print anthologies in the UK and the US in 2007. In 2006, as part of a writers workshop of the Vienna Poetry Academy, she participated in English in the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival) and the annual 24-hour literary reading, Rund um die Burg . Sylvia recently took early retirement from a policy career with the International Telecommunication Union, a UN specialised agency in Geneva, Switzerland, and currently lives with her Austrian husband in Vienna where she is working on her thesis and the revision of her two novels. A member of the Australian Society of Authors, the NSW Writers Centre, the Geneva Writers Group and Swiss Romand PEN. Publications and broadcast: Stories have been published in print and online literary magazines in Australia, USA, New Zealand, UK, France, Switzerland, Netherlands and Japan, notably in Thema (USA), The European Magazine (UK), Eclectica (USA), The Richmond Review (UK), and Southern Ocean Review (NZ). A story was read on BBC World Service in 1997. The story, The Boy from Bul was one of five finalists in the NH Hoteles 10,000 Euro Competition in Spain and was a notable 2004 story in the Story South Award (USA). A collection of stories, The Past Present, was published in ebook and print formats by IUMIX Ltd, UK, in 2001. A story, Widow s Peak was published in the anthology Valentine s Day: Women Against Men - Stories of Revenge, Duckworth (Duckbacks), UK, 2000. That story was mentioned in The Economist. Other authors in the anthology were Carol Shields, Fay Weldon, Alice Munro, Joyce Carole Oates and Agatha Christie.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Interactive Press (November 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1876819421
• ISBN-13: 978-1876819422
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,006,681 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sylvia Petter is an Australian writer living in Austria. Her stories also appear in the charity anthologies 100 Stories for Haiti, 50 Stories for Pakistan, A Pint and a Haircut - True Irish Stories and 100 Stories for Queensland.