Dear Friends,
It’s been awhile since we sent out a Bonfire newsletter. Much has happened and continues to happen but we wanted to highlight one particular happening: Sleep Capricorn, the debut collection from Jack Norman is published today! Congratulations to Jack! Sleep Capricorn is available through the Bonfire Books website, Amazon and available to order through brick-and-mortar bookshops all over the world. Thank you to all who pre-ordered. Some pre-orders have shipped and the remainder will be sent no later than Monday the 20th.
Now, on to the book.
Other publishers will sometimes claim that their books are mainstream literary fiction, but to quote Mick Dundee (paraphrasing slightly), “THIS is Mainstream Literary Fiction.”
Jack’s work harkens back to a type of fiction that, being impossible to ideologically pigeonhole, is rare these days. The book calls to mind the work David Malouf and Patrick White, in this country, and John Cheever and John Updike in the USA. Sleep Capricorn particularly resembles David Malouf’s stories “The Valley of Lagoons”, “At Schindler’s”, and “Great Day”, and not only because of the Queensland setting they share, but because of a certain quality of deliberation and emotional precision. The stories are deceptive slices of realism. Characters do mundane things: prune their back gardens, go to demoralising workplaces, attend awkward funerals, make small talk with cousins they’d rather not see, play video games (both the child’s type and the adult’s social media type) to avoid their families.
Amidst all of this life in the stable, relatively well-ordered world of sub-tropical Australia they also frequently and spontaneously fall into dreams, become disembodied, contemplate death and the walking death that modern life offers as a norm. They inhabit phantasias of other lives, other possibilities for themselves that have been foreclosed with the passage of time; and nightmares of animal infestations, crippling suspicion of spouses, and the consciousness that their own ambitions have come to a self-imposed end. With the fading of longing comes mature acceptance, of their own faults and the faults of others, yet dreams, like daily life, must continue. Gardens still grow and paperwork piles up. In the end, with lush detail, the landscape itself speaks on behalf of its inhabitants, like Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley or Ron Hansen’s Nebraska. These stories are deceptively realist Strayan dreamscapes. With strong doses of sardonic humour, bird’s eye view compassion and banana bender bluntness, Norman gives full inner and outer life to the proverbial “Middle Australians.”
This is an exceptional book in the best tradition of literary art, not simply “for art’s sake” (an impossibility) but for the sake of the unique truth-seeking and truth-reflecting that the best fiction offers. We are so proud to bring Jack’s exceptional work to you.
YOU’RE INVITED TO A LAUNCH PARTY!
Sleep Capricorn will be launched by at 3pm, Saturday, December 6th in Edinburgh Gardens, Fitzroy North, Melbourne. Exact location TBD. Drinks and nibbles provided. Join us to celebrate the launch of Sleep Capricorn and Bonfire’s year of 2025.
“Sleep Capricorn announces the arrival of a real new talent.” –Dr Charles Cornish-Dale (Raw Egg Nationalist)
“Jack Norman’s debut collection reveals the rich inner world of the sensitive young man. Centering itself in familial conflict and heartfelt efforts to determine what nebulous meaning is found in nostalgia. One piece deconstructs the father and son relationship, challenging the traditional mythology of the father. Norman pens the paternal shadow critically, but in all of his clear prosaic skill, still ultimately arrives at love.” -Emily K Sipiora
“There’s no getting past these stories. Norman is a real prose stylist straight from the old tradition. You’ll need to stop at all these phrases to read them again and again before you’re ready to move on.” -Alex Prestia, Editor of miniMAG
“With SLEEP CAPRICORN, Jack Norman pulls the reader through the halls of a submerged memory. Fiction and biography overlap as imprecise reflections on youth and the essence of rural Austrailia are recalled with Gass-like precision. Fathers, sons, husbands, wives, the tenacious aged, and the afflicted young—all play their part in a tangible and surreal landscape of mangrove and bitumen, which seems to ponder the frailty of its inhabitants. Norman’s stories are honest and sometimes painful. His characters struggle, and find humor in their blackest moments. Norman presents them here with a lucid sincerity that lives past the end of their stories, and calls on our own haziest dreams. We know these characters, these stubborn old men and these forgotten roadside villages; with SLEEP CAPRICORN, we are re-introduced to our own memories, as lived by another.” -Ogden Nesmer, Editor at Unreal Press
“Jack Norman’s new collection covers important ground in the interior lives of men. Hardships, grace, the burdens of work and family, the reality of failure.” –Lewis Woolston, Author of The Everlasting And Other Stories