Other stories are hopeful, even redemptive. The title story, ‘On Their Wild and Fearless Chests’, prophetically insists that a young girl is ‘more than what surrounds you. You, my love, are fearless.’ Another optimistic story, ‘All the Edges of the Alphabet’, is a tender imagining of the life of Janet Frame, from her years of wrongful institutionalisation to the blessed satisfactions of her writerly life. The collection also includes autonomous women, benevolent mothers, the gift of reading, and bracing sisterhood. Not that its feminist perspective offers a simplistic model of male oppressor/female victim. There are stories of monstrously neglectful or abusive mothers, and stories of women and girls who, seduced by the desire to be ‘noticed’ or ‘loved’ by men, become abject self-victimisers. What also distinguishes this collection is the absence of morally self-righteous judgement; instead, the stories create empathy for wounded or invisible women, what the narrator of ‘Drowning in Thick Air’ describes as ‘the unwashed, the unkempt, the large and the sullen … the women ignored and raped in the dark’. A haunting, uncompromising collection, Wild Fearless Chests – stylistically polished, often visceral in effect – offers a bold new voice in the Australian literary culture.

No Neat Endings by Dominic Carew

MidnightSun, $27.99 pb, 219 pp

In contrast to Beaumont’s female-centred collection, Dominic Carew’s No Neat Endings explores the complexities of masculine psychology and embodiment. Its deadliness emerges from keen observations of masculinity under siege. The opening story, ‘Nineteen’, uses mordant humour to reveal a young man’s sexual shame in an increasingly performative masculine culture. Other stories deal with the anxieties for men of competitive or deadening work, like the lawyer in ‘Farewelling Time’ who feels his days becoming ‘untethered, a thread of cotton shivering on the sleeve of a jumper’. There are men who fear death, and men who fail their partners or their own best versions of themselves. There are also daggy dads, egotistical wankers, and men who self-destruct.

This impressive range of character types is complemented by the collection’s tonal range, from the farcical to the melancholy. Sometimes the tone shifts within a single story. ‘A Problem’, which deals with the gender politics of online dating, begins in comic mode, then becomes a sinister tale of sexist bonds between men. By contrast, ‘The Episode’ is a deeply affecting story of a man’s inability to communicate with his wife. Returning from hospital, his action of ‘running his fingers across the surface of things’ serves as a telling metaphor for his avoidance of intimacy. Indeed, the collection as a whole excels in its use of ‘the unsaid’ – one of the characteristics of the short story’s aesthetic – as a sign of masculine inexpressiveness. The cost of such isolation is revealed in the story ‘Exit Ghost’, in which a man’s inability to ‘tell … a secret he’d been holding onto’ leads to a shocking conclusion. The conclusions to these nineteen realist stories are often inconclusive, open-ended, or ambivalent; as the title No Neat Endings suggests, the collection offers no easy resolutions to the desires and disappointments of the contemporary Australian male.

Shirl by Wayne Marshall

Affirm Press, $26.99 pb, 277 pp

Wayne Marshall’s collection Shirl, shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, uses deadly humour as social criticism. Blending conventional realism with magic realism, satire, allegory, or faux biography, the stories mock self-entitled masculinity, the cultural myths of mateship and egalitarianism, and the escapism of booze and sport. The first story, ‘Cod Opening’, which begins as a blokey yarn about a regular fishing trip, uses the sudden appearance of a brutally wounded mermaid to contest the will to power of traditional masculinity. Other fantastical visitations abound: a shark appears in a public swimming pool; armed intergalactic aliens enforce a year-long ban on watching football; interplanetary colonisation allows a man to exploit an exotic, blue-trunked wife. Echoing, Frankenstein, ‘The Yowie’s Visit’ reveals Australia’s indifference to the cultural outsider’s tales of suffering: ‘Shit, sorry, mate. Didn’t catch any of that. Was checking the results in the fifth at Fulton Park.’ In its concern for a range of social problems, the collection’s use of humour, whether acerbic, whimsical, or absurd, reminds us that seriousness is not the same as solemnity.

A number of stories deal with the issue of cancer, no doubt influenced by Marshall’s publicly acknowledged experience of the disease. ‘Levitation’ begins with the details of a cancer patient’s misery, but changes to a more hopeful tone with the arrival of a new medical discovery called ‘inter-retinal therapy’. While this fabrication is easily read as a dig at claims for a ‘miracle’ cure, the story’s conclusion shifts into something much more surprising and interesting. The introduction of ‘inter-retinal therapy’ is only one of many nods and winks to the reader in this inventive début collection. Whether poignant, unsettling, or laugh-out-loud hilarious, the conceptually striking stories in Shirl are politically incisive and a great pleasure to read.

A Couple of Things Before the End by Sean O'Beirne

Black Inc., $27.99 pb, 208 pp

Sean O’Beirne’s A Couple of Things Before the End also uses humour to deadly effect. His targets include bullying upholders of the Anzac legend, racists, reality television, and populist politicians, and his chief strategy is the creation of distinctive and convincing voices. O’Beirne has a keen ear for the vernacular, self-serving clichés, academic discourse, and the language of officialdom. One of his many amusing voices is the monarchist whose newsletter warns that Charles’s environmental concerns make him ‘THE threat’ to the future of the institution, while promoting Kate – ‘Very Fit. Very Good Posture’ – as a distraction from William’s unappealing baldness. Another amusing example is the befuddled MC of the End of Year Night with the Fellas, struggling to express a more confessional version of masculinity. In the futuristic story ‘Missy’, there is the voice of a smugly privileged woman who, over the course of many emails, becomes increasingly desperate for rescue from the ravages of climate change.

Every voice, spoken or written, in the collection is addressed to an audience and reveals the ways in which human communication can be miscommunication, self-delusion, rationalisation, or coercion. The most disturbing story, ‘Curry’, written in the form of a lawyer’s letter, voices a morally inexcusable defence of the real and appallingly racist acts committed in 1930 by Robert Curry, Superintendent of Palm Island Aboriginal Reserve, the subject of Thea Astley’s novel The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996). ‘Nauru,’ written as a heavily redacted bureaucrat’s report, uses an ingenious conceit – the detention of former Australian prime ministers on Nauru – to expose the inhumanity of Australia’s Border Protection policies. The use of humour in this story, as throughout the collection, is both hugely entertaining and ethically instructive. The collection as a whole offers the gift of story – modestly described in its title as a ‘couple of things’ – as consolation before ‘the end’ of civility and of civilisation itself.

The arrival of these four short story collections shows the increasing willingness of Australian publishers to take a commercial risk on a genre sometimes dismissed by readers as superficial, ephemeral, and easy to write. Each collection is clearly the product of hard thinking about a writer’s creative choices. They also give readers the pleasures of audacity, intensity, and unexpected outcomes: what the writer Richard Ford famously called – to conclude with a different metaphor – the ‘high-wire act of literature’.