Praiseworthy

By Alexis Wright Lands-rights activist and Indigenous writer Alexis Wright is an award-winning author and member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Deeply informed and inspired by the sagas and literatures of the world, she walks her path fiercely allied with the ancient truths and present facts of the Aboriginal Australian life. “Praiseworthy,” her latest book, is a hallucinatory, uncompromising, and genre-breaking work in ten oracle-parts. A massive beast of a novel, it pushes allegory and language to the very limit. It may well be the last novel to read before the sun falls on us. Alexis Wright’s aching prose of vision and tenacity is an offering that urges a new reading of the past and future fate of the world—and we would do well to heed her pleadings. — Herbert Pföstl, Book Consultant for the New Museum Store. In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious haze cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the anc