Cassie McCullagh

Now the very first short story in this collection called Dr Pacific is set on the far north coast of New South Wales and here's a reading from it.

Why don't we listen to it to get even more of a sense of his style.

Tracey Trompf, reading from Robert Drew's Dr Pacific.

And I should say that Tracey is not as old as the character Bette, but she kindly did the reading for us.

That first line again, Brett, Don dropped dead on the sand and that was that.

Cassie and I were talking earlier in the program about Curtis Sittenfeld's collection, You Think It, I'll Say It, which was very self-consciously about what it means to be American.

It seems to me that Robert Drew's short fiction, although it does explore various things about Australian-ness,

isn't being particularly self-conscious about that.

And that whole question of whether a short story is resolved or has an ambiguous ending is something that I think we'll come back to as we keep on talking about these books.

But I should say that the book that Brett read, Robert Drew's True Colours of the Sea, is published by Hamish Hamilton.

Let's move on to another American writer here on the bookshelf, Roxane Gay.

Now, Roxane Gay wrote Bad Feminist, Hunger, A Memoir of My Body, and Difficult Women, among other things.

So she's a Haitian American, and her latest is a collection of short stories called Aiti.

Actually, it's not quite the latest.

It's a re-release with some new work added.

I think it was first published in 2011.

Rowena Gonsalves, how would you describe the feel of this collection?

It's very vivid, isn't it?

And she uses a sort of patois at times in the dialogue so you know that you're moving in and out of somewhere else.

The style of her short stories varies quite a lot across this collection.