‘Long live imagined animals, the need, the capacity.’
Sydney cats: Four extra shows just dropped for Grief Is The Thing With Feathers.
Hit @belvoirst up for tickets before you can’t.
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Due to extraordinary demand and a waitlist spilling over, GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS is extending for 4 SHOWS ONLY, and must close 29 AUG.
This is your final chance to catch the show that has exhilarated critics and audiences.
All new tickets are now on sale via the link in bio, but they won’t last long. If you’ve been waiting, now is the moment to book.
Co-produced with @belvoirst
📸 Brett Boardman
New York Times: The last book that made you laugh?
Stephen Fry: “The Empress Murders" by Toby Schmitz, a classic whodunit and laugh out loud funny at the same time.’
#TheEmpressMurders
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‘Schmitz wants to entertain his readers, and also to provoke them. His characters are delightfully loquacious – ribald wits, most of them – and even the sullen ones are daubed with charisma. What it’s all for is another matter. Is The Empress Murders a pulpit for Schmitz to rail against the abuses of empire past and present – or is it an improv stage? Is it a grand dissertation on history – or an experimental frolic? Are we being instructed to reflect on the past, or to look around at our annihilating present with fresh eyes? The answer to these questions is: all of it, and more.’
Catriona Menzies-Pike (The Guardian)
#TheEmpressMurders
‘This is a novel that wants to be everything; it’s stuffed to the gills not just with corpses but with language, with games, with gorgeous costumes and period details. The effect is overwhelming. But as Schmitz and the Dadaists and a thousand cabaret artists know, aesthetic derangement is a fit response – perhaps the only appropriate response – to a senseless and cruel world ferrying itself towards destruction.’
Catriona Menzies-Pike (The Guardian)
#TheEmpressMurders
/books/2025/may/26/the-empress-murders-by-toby-schmitz-review-jazz-age-mystery-packed-with-corpses-and-charisma
‘The Empress Murders is a violent book: nobody here is dispatched with a nip of arsenic in their camomile tea.’
Tom Gilling (The Australian)
#TheEmpressMurders
.au/arts/gore-on-the-high-seas/news-story/6afe5b68387b347fdf49832f6e9b0a0e
‘Even a few short chapters narrated in the voice of the ocean liner make a crazy kind of sense as the first-class passengers guzzle gin and squabble about Dada in the ship’s cocktail lounge.’
#CrazyKindOfSense
#TheEmpressMurders
‘Brilliant, bonkers and bloody - The Empress Murders is what you get when you let a mischievous thespian schooled in Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and Agatha Christie loose on the crime genre.’ — Sue Turnbull (The Sydney Morning Herald)
.au/culture/books/prepare-to-be-discombobulated-by-this-bonkers-crime-caper-20250515-p5lzmb.html
#TheEmpressMurders
A body is discovered – on a mountain in 2006 in ‘Burning Mountain’ from @darcyleetindale (via @penguinbooksaus ) and on a ship in 1925 in ‘The Empress Murders’ by @tobymschmitz (via @allenandunwin ). See what happens next in two very different takes on the mystery thriller genre from two clever Aussie authors – both books out now! #awcbookmail
