Brian Castro: book bundle #1

In the character of Abraham Quin – a thrice-divorced migrant and writer, and one-time postman and professor – one of Australia’s most important novelists writes about the experience of old age. ‘A masterpiece’, writes Bernadette Brennan. ‘Brian Castro at his epistolary, intoxicating best.’

Blindness and Rage recalls Virgil and Dante in its descent into the underworld of writing. Always an innovator, Castro again throws down a challenge to the limits of the novel form.

Street to Street is one of Brian Castro’s best books yet, a comic-tragic enactment of the anxieties of the writing life, in which the early twentieth-century Sydney poet Christopher Brennan plays a major role. The novella is the perfect form for Castro’s purpose, its compression heightening the wit and energy of his prose, and his remarkable feel for the embarrassments of character.