Stories Published by Spineless Wonders

my abbr.d life

‘Bringing together 20 very different stories, My Life and Other Fictions is a bold debut from Michael Giacometti and a unique exercise in experimentation with form and voice.’ ELIZABETH FLUX, Books+ Publishing An Aboriginal girl craves her abuse...

my abbr.d life- the story of the story

Michael Giacometti Literary Fiction

This essay tells the fraught history of the microfiction, my abbr.d life. The following essay was originally published by Spineless Wonders in Cracking The Spine: ten short Australian stories and how they were written.

brb be right back

Maree Dawes Adult

Partner away and home alone but for the sleeping children, our protagonist joins online chat. As a newbie, she battles with the language and protocols of cyberspace and wonders if anyone will ever speak to her online. Then online life becomes mor...

The Memory Bones

Amanda O'Callaghan Literary Fiction

This short story was a finalist in the Carmel Bird Short Story Award, selected by Amanda Lohrey (2012). An elderly lady, afflicted with dementia, reveals the answer to a decades-long murder mystery.

ADNARCHY

Mark Vender Literary Fiction

At home Kevin is a reluctant carer for his brother; on the street he's a suburban soldier, armed with an Artline

The Lake Story

Ron Elliott Short Stories

A moving story told with gritty realism and vivid imagery, reconstructed through storytelling, emails and unreliable memory.

Panthers and the Museum of Fire

Jen Craig Fiction

Panthers and the Museum of Fire is a novella about walking, memory and writing. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney café to return a manuscript by a recently-dead writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator’s entire world...

How to Read an Australian Short Story

Ryan O'Neill Short Stories

Read about my short story comprised of lines from 150 short Australian stories plus stories and essays from nine other Australian writers. Intro by Amanda Lohrey. ‘Cracking the spine is not just a deftly curated overview of the contemporary Austra...

Permission To Lie

Julie Chevalier Short Stories

A collection of short stories set in places as diverse as a nudist colony, the corporate world and prison. Beneath her wry humour and snappy style, Chevalier brings insight and compassion to her depiction of contemporary Australian life and to gro...

The Waterfowl Are Drunk!

Kate Liston-Mills Short Stories

Kate Liston-Mills' The Waterfowl Are Drunk! is a series of short stories set in the author's hometown, Pambula, on New South Wales' far south coast. A fox stalks a nest of hatching swans, loving parents deal with their child's Down syndrome diag...

We're all travellers here

Marjorie Lewis-Jones Fiction

‘We’re All Travellers Here’ won the Carmel Bird Award. Award judge Michael McGirr said my prize-winning tale: is ‘the story of an older mother and her adult son on tour. The son is buried alive in his own sophistication and self-concern. The moth...

I Put A Spell On You

Sam George-Allen Politics

In I Put A Spell on You, Sam George-Allen explores how certain practices of women today mirror the work of their spell-casting ancestors. This collection sheds light on who witches actually were, before patriarchal societies painted these women as...

The Dead Aviatrix

Carmel Bird Contemporary Women

This is the title story from my new collection, The Dead Aviatrix: Eight short stories. It was inspired by something that happened to me as the writer of a novel some years ago. It was an awful and troubling thing, and I wondered for a long time a...

My Hearts Are Your Hearts

Carmel Bird Short Stories

What are the hares getting up to among the sunflowers? Who is paying $6000 for a raincoat? The priest is good, kind, adored, believed – but can the schoolgirl trust him? Who kills his wife and dumps the body in the pool? What if you find your deat...

The Dead Aviatrix: the story behind the stories

Carmel Bird Short Stories

The Dead Aviatrix is an ebook published by Spineless Wonders in November 2017. It is the first book of short stories in the Spineless Wonders new Capsule Collection series. The eight stories in The Dead Aviatrix are not obviously connected with e...

Bulldozer

Ariella Van Luyn Fiction

Step into the dysfunctional life of Eunice…   Oblivious to her unhappy marriage, still living in her mother’s house and unable to stop biting her nails, Eunice feels as if she has no control over her own life. When her new husband needs to make a...

DANNY BOY

Marian Matta Fiction

Danny is a young man struggling to find his place in the world and to express his own inner truth.

Dear Writer ... Revisited

Carmel Bird Fiction

People who are beginning to write fiction, particularly people living in remote places, often send their manuscripts to an assessor, and the letters in the original edition of Dear Writer were inspired by correspondence I had with writers when I w...

From Paradise to Wonderland

Carmel Bird Short Stories

The story appears in my collection 'My Hearts Are Your Hearts' (Spineless Wonders Publishing). It is accompanied in the collection by the essay which I have added here.

Hard Knots

Libbie Chellew Fiction

Short story. Jules is pregnant and constipated. And freezing. Her husband is indifferent to her constipation, Google doesn’t seem to be able to help her, and something about her childhood is making her uneasy. It must be performance anxiety – but...

The Last Wilkie's and Other Stories

Jon Steiner Fiction

Short fiction by Jon Steiner. Sample story: Jungle Train. Roisin finds that traveling across Malaysia with her partner's parents is not what she expected.

Lives of the Dead

Jane Skelton Short Stories

Although Lives of the Dead and other stories is a collection filled with memorable characters whose struggles are credible and utterly recognisable, it is the vivid and evocative imagery throughout, and the deceptively quiet and introspective moo...

Loopholes

Susan McCreery Short Stories

Read it from cover to cover, or take a dip – these 67 microfictions are all under 250 words. Humans at their most hilarious, vulnerable and offbeat.

Discussions & Announcements

Author Q&A with Carmel Bird on State Library Victoria community

We'll be joining the team over on the State Library Victoria community page for a discussion with Carmel Bird on Thursday Dec 14 from 8pm AEST. Carmel will be answering questions about her new...

MY GIFT TO HUMANITY

In 2018, I authored the first ever book of English poetry which covered all the important topics of religion in one single collection. It received excellent Foreword, Reviews & Special Comments by...

The Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award

Hi all, we are very excited to let our Tablo followers know that this new award is now open. We'll be accepting submissions of up to 30,000 words until April 30, 2018. Carmel Bird, the award judge,...

Author Q&A with Susan McCreery for Thurs. 8pm AEST - please leave your Qs here

We'll be chatting with the author of Loopholes, Susan McCreery, here on Thursday night. Loopholes is a collection of microfiction - many less than half a page in length - so it will be great chance...