Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

Author: Gerald Murnane

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 192088209X

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This collection of essays leads into the eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.


Tamarisk Row

Tamarisk Row

Author: Gerald Murnane

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1920882391

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First published in 1974, and out of print for almost twenty years, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's first novel, and in many respects his masterpiece, an unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a Victorian country town in the late 1940s.


Stream System

Stream System

Author: Gerald Murnane

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 0374717281

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Stories from a mind-bending Australian master, “a genius on the level of Beckett” (Teju Cole) Never before available to readers in this hemisphere, these stories—originally published from 1985 to 2012—offer an irresistible compendium of the work of one of contemporary fiction’s greatest magicians. While the Australian master Gerald Murnane’s reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Brutal, comic, obscene, and crystalline, Stream System runs from the haunting “Land Deal,” which imagines the colonization of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams; to “Finger Web,” which tells a quietly terrifying, fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny; to “The Interior of Gaaldine,” which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself. No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how—and why—we read.


Inland

Inland

Author: Gerald Murnane

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

Published: 2016-05-01

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1922146293

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With Giramondo’s publication of Barley Patch and A History of Books, Gerald Murnane has attracted renewed interest as a brilliant writer and Nobel Prize contender. First published 25 years ago, Inland is one of Murnane’s most complex and rewarding works, a study of guilt, longing and regret rich in metaphysical insights. From his native district in the Melbourne suburb of Pascoe Vale, Murnane’s narrator imagines another world, in Szolnok county Hungary, and within that world another, in Ideal South Dakota, each haunted by the betrayal of a young girl, each driven by the possibility of restitution. Murnane’s mastery over language and his pressing towards the edges of what fiction can accomplish make this book a landmark in Australian literature.


Border Districts

Border Districts

Author: Gerald Murnane

Publisher:

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0374115753

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"[A] man moves from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of seeing, a lifetime of reading. Which sights, which people, which books, fictional characters, turns of phrase, and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? A dark-haired woman with a wistful expression? An ancestral house in the grasslands? The colors in translucent panes of glass, in marbles and goldfish and racing silks? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloging this treasure, little knowing where his 'report' will lead and what secrets will be brought to light"--Amazon.com.


Last Letter to a Reader

Last Letter to a Reader

Author: Gerald Murnane

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

Published: 2021-11-01

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 192581890X

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Final work by internationally acclaimed Australian author Gerald Murnane, reflecting on his career as a writer, and the fifteen books which have led critics to praise him as ‘a genius on the level of Beckett’. A book which will appeal equally to Murnane’s legion of fans, and to those new to his work, attracted by his reputation as a truly original Australian writer. In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane began a project which would round off his career as a writer – he would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary archives, the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. But as the reports grew, they themselves took on the form of a book, Last Letter to a Reader. The essays on each of his works travel through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances which gave rise to the writing, images, associations, reflections on the theory of fiction, and memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration which accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving ending to what must surely be his last work as death approaches. ‘Help me, dear one, to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.’ ‘No living Australian writer, not even Les Murray, has higher claims to permanence or a richer sense of distinction’ — Sydney Morning Herald ‘The emotional conviction...is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiseled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.’ — J.M. Coetzee


Barley Patch

Barley Patch

Author: Gerald Murnane

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 2011-09-20

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1564786765

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Discover the Australian novelist ranked by Ladbrokes as a top-five contender for the 2010 Nobel Prize. Barley Patch takes as its subject the reasons an author might abandon fiction—or so he thinks—forever. Using the form of an oblique self-interrogation, it begins with the Beckettian question “Must I write?” and proceeds to expand from this small, personal query to fill in the details of a landscape entirely unique in world letters, a chronicle of the images from life and fiction that have endured and mingled in the author’s mind, as well as the details (and details within details) that they contain. As interested, if not more so, in the characters from his books—finished or unfinished—as with the members of his family or his daily life, the narrator lays bare the act of writing and imagining, finally giving us a glimpse of the mythical place where the characters of fiction dwell before they come into existence in books. In the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, Barley Patch is like no other fiction being written today.


A Million Windows

A Million Windows

Author: Gerald Murnane

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1922146579

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This new work of fiction by one of Australia’s most highly regarded authors focuses on the importance of trust, and the possibility of betrayal, in storytelling as in life. It tests the relationship established between author and reader, and on occasions of intimacy, between child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane’s fiction is woven from images, and the feelings associated with them, and the images that flit through A Million Windows like butterflies – the reflections of the setting sun like spots of golden oil, the houses of two or perhaps three storeys, the procession of dark-haired females, the clearing in the forest, the colours indigo and silver-grey, the death of a young woman who had leaped into a well – build to an emotional crescendo that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of their patterning.


Someone Else

Someone Else

Author: John Hughes

Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 1920882251

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In SOMEONE ELSE award-winning essayist John Hughes pays homage to twenty one artists, writers and musicians who have had a formative influence on his imagination. From Chekhov and Borges and Beckett, to Proust, Rothko and Cage - each essay brings its subject to life in unexpected ways. Kafka rewrites the parable of Abraham and Isaac, with no one to stay Abraham's knife. Wittgenstein considers the relationship between turtles and time. Bob Dylan stars in a fantasy of travellers and deserts and women with knives and silver earrings. Just around the corner from where Hughes works, Dostoyevsky fries kidneys in the kitchen of his Stanley Street terrace... Like THE IDEA OF HOME, SOMEONE ELSE uses the essay as a form of autobiography. Here, however, the essays are fictions. Or are they? Hughes tells the stories of the figures who live in his mind by making them tell his stories - and in doing so engages in an art of literary ventriloquism.