Collected Short Fiction
Originally published between 1985 and 2012, these stories offer an enthralling introduction to the work of one of contemporary fiction’s greatest magicians, and a map of Gerald Murnane’s evolution as a writer. Spare, transparent and profane, this career-spanning volume ranges from ‘Finger Web’, a fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny, to ‘Land Deal’, which imagines Australia’s colonisation and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams, to ‘The Interior of Gaaldine’, a story which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself, and which points the way toward Murnane’s later works, from Barley Patch to Border Districts.
With potent style and determined vision, Murnane creates sensitive portraits of intimate relationships – with parents, uncles and aunts, and particularly children – and probes each situation for anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight. Murnane treats emotions and thoughts as he does minor objects: he shines light through them and makes them new, remaking the vessel of literature as he goes.
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- If you subscribed to And Other Stories before 15th December 2019, you will have received your limited edition copy of Gerald Murnane’s Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs– in which all subscribers are thanked by name – in January 2020, before its official publication, as well as up to five other And Other Stories titles per year. Find out more about our subscriptions.
- Gerald Murnane was coined in The Guardian as “one of Australia’s greatest writers” and The New York Times considers him “one of the best English-language writers alive.”
- Gerald Murnane speaks to Tristan Foster at 3:AM Magazine about writing, craftmanship, and his place in Australian literature.
Reviews
Chris Power
The Guardian
'This extraordinary piece of writing quivers on the same line between inspiration and mania that many of the stories do, and delivers a strain of exhilaration I have only encountered through the work of Gerald Murnane.’
John Self
Irish Times
‘Murnane’s writing exhibits what literature should: an insight into a way of seeing that is quite unlike our own.'
Adrian Nathan West
Times Literary Supplement
‘As Murnane remarks, “My writing was not an attempt to produce something called literature but an attempt to discover meaning”, and his insistence on the artifice of written enterprise bears witness to a thoroughness and integrity that far outweigh the minor virtue – or minor vice – of readability.’
Benjamin H, Ogden
The New York Times
‘A voice so clear, so unaffected, that it’s a voice for everyone.’
The New Republic
‘The sentences are laid on like varnish, coat after coat, until the text gleams with a high shine. Immaculate in its unadorned plainness, at certain moments his prose achieves a crystalline beauty.’
