Finola Moorhead's tour-de-force from 35 years ago is a delight to read again today.

I first read the Handwritten Modern Classic in the eighties, and was delighted and my delight has been re-ignited... The Handwritten makes us laugh, sigh, groan, roar in protest, escape into, deeply, deeply into, the thinking and the imagining and the writing. As Finola says ‘imagination is best employed on what is’.

A Handwritten Modern Classic is a manifesto, it is (at times) handwritten poetry disguised as prose. Interestingly it still seems contemporary – Malcolm Fraser may not be PM but the issues remain the same. Above all it asks questions about writing and literature that we still need to ask today... It is exciting that Spinifex has republished this small press classic – and brought it to the attention of a new generation, a new group of readers and writers.

Moorhead dips her courageous, argumentative stances in the acid of impending postmodernity’s wrestling with what can be said to be real, true. In that, the book’s double-act constant of porousness and intellectual wilfulness keeps it and its questioning lines alive.

A writer's manifesto or action plan, it has lists that echo down the page in a way type couldn't convey...The calligraphy binds you more closely with the author...its stimulating ideas about writing...are maintained from the first page to the last.

Finola Moorhead’s A Handwritten Modern Classic first appeared on bookshelves in 1982. The book’s recent republication by Spinifex Press will doubtless mean that it is introduced to a new readership. ...A Handwritten Modern Classic remains a wonderfully lively and eccentric read.