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Collected Short Fiction

512 pages
Paperback, 23.5 x 15.3 cm
Published April 2018
ISBN 9781925336641
Epdf ISBN 9781925336719
Epub ISBN 9781925336726

Collected Short Fiction

Gerald Murnane

This volume brings together Gerald Murnane’s shorter works of fiction, most of which have been out of print for the past twenty-five years. They include such masterpieces as ‘When the Mice Failed to Arrive’, ‘Stream System’, ‘First Love’, ‘Emerald Blue’, and ‘The Interior of Gaaldine’, a story which holds the key to the long break in Murnane’s career, and points the way towards his later works, from Barley Patch to Border Districts. Much is made of Murnane’s distinctive and elaborate style as a writer, but there is no one to match him in his sensitive portraits of family members – parents, uncles and aunts, and particularly children – and in his probing of situations which contain anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight.

The seventy-eight-year-old Nobel Prize contender writes like a clockmaker: every sentence is a finely tooled cog, every book an exquisite machine.
Australian Book Review

It is this yearning quality, which seems utterly genuine despite the note of ironic self-awareness, that gives Murnane’s long creative project, with its unique and eccentric combination of fiction and biography, history and self-constructed metaphysics, its peculiar poignancy.The Saturday Paper

Gerald Murnane is the most original writer our country has so far produced.Australian

About the Author

Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane is a recipient of an Emeritus Fellowship from the Australia Council, the Patrick White Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Adelaide Festival Literature Award for Innovation and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. His last work of fiction, Border Districts, received the the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

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Reviews

The New York TimeTwo New Books From Australia, Unconstrained by Literary Convention’ Splice

The Wall Street Journal

The Age‘The difficult pleasure of Australia’s cult literary figure’

ANZLitLovers

The Guardian

Articles

New York Times Magazine‘Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?’

Paris Review

The Guardian‘Gerald Murnane: one of Australia’s greatest writers you may never have heard of’

New Statesman ‘The navel-gazing fictions of Gerald Murnane’

Music and Literature profile of Gerald Murnane

ABC ‘Australian author, Nobel candidate Gerald Murnane on having career upswing at 80 then quitting publishing’