Books
The Mighty 'Bras
Wordsworthy Publishing, 2023
When Matildas star Sam Kerr was just a kid, when the inaugural A-League Women’s season was still years away, and when a World Cup on Australian soil was a fanciful idea, a mob of mature Melbourne women threw caution, asthma inhalers and orthopaedic inserts to the wind and formed a team to play in the lowest division of the metropolitan league.
As their coach, author Paul Connolly, documents in this hilarious and heartwarming memoir, the Mighty ’Bras, as this Brunswick Zebras team became known, fell in love with a game; a love more intense for its late blossoming. More importantly, these footballing novices discovered that their seemingly whimsical adventure turned out to be so much more, and forged lasting friendships and a sense of community that made all the bumps, bruises and calamitous losses worthwhile.
Paperback edition will be available to order from your local bookshop (RRP $24.99) or online retailers (Amazon AU, Booktopia, The Nile).
Also available as an eBook.
Kitchen Sink Drama
Text Publishing 2020
As seen in Good Weekend: one hundred of Paul Connolly’s beloved one-hundred-word vignettes along with Jim Pavlidis’s whimsical illustrations. From tempestuous family roasts to the first blooms of young love, from relationship missteps to moments of familial joy, Kitchen Sink Drama reflects domestic life in all its messy, delightful and humorous glory. With characters depicted in nuanced fullness, these poignant, pithy stories capture the truth at the heart of so many of our experiences—each one a glimpse of a whole world. Kitchen Sink Drama is a collection of some of the finest writing on the human condition.
"There is a gentle, quizzical humour at play in these bite-sized vignettes. One stylistic quirk is the way expansive syntax can press against the brevity of the form, situating curious, almost aphoristic internal moments within much larger ones left unsaid. This sort of fiction is the literary inheritor of A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Life by David Foster Wallace...and an intriguing example of what can work in such an abbreviated form."
The Age/The Sydney Morning Herald
Father Figures
Affirm Press, 2018
Twenty of Australia’s brightest and funniest writers share the joys, hazards and mysteries of fatherhood and how we all relate to ‘dad’.
The shape of the family tree has changed irrevocably in recent decades, and there is no such thing as a ‘typical dad’ anymore (though dad jokes like cockroaches, never seem to die). From the grim archetype of the emotionally distant father to the bumbling man-child who’s a pair of underpants away from being an ape, there has never been more freedom for men to choose what sort of dad they want to be. Or, for that matter, so many opportunities to stuff it up.
Powerful, hilarious and touching, Father Figures features …
Anson Cameron, Tony Birch, James Button, Barry Dickins, Gideon Haigh, Richard Hinds, Dominic Knight, Malcolm Knox, Benjamin Law, Kate Legge, William McInnes, Mischa Merz, Paddy O’Reilly, Kerryn Phelps, Angela Pippos, Nick Place, Ben Pobjie, Sami Shah, Tracey Spicer, Tony Wilson.
‘This is a marvellous book. Written from the perspectives of daughters, sons and fathers, this book provides great insight into the joys and hazards of fatherhood.’
CANBERRA WEEKLY
‘The pieces are well written, beautifully edited, and often laugh-out-loud funny. All told, this is a heartwarming collection. One to buy for the father figure in your life – whomever that may be.’
BETTER READING
The World's Weirdest Sports
Pier 9, 2006
Bog snorkelling, dwyle flunking, goat grabbing, wife carrying - they might sound like the newest entries in a dictionary of euphemisms but they are in fact sports. Strange sports, yes. In fact, let's be honest, downright bizarre sports. But real sports nonetheless. And there's dozens more where these came from, as you'll discover in this witty and oddly compelling round-up of the world's strangest events held in the glorious name of competition.