Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
‘Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing.’
This collection of essays leads the reader into the searching and wildly fertile imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classics Border Districts and Tamarisk Row, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.
He writes of himself: as a boy making racehorses of his marbles, an obsession shared with Jack Kerouac; as a writer, working his first ten years in secret; as a reader, trying to understand the mystery of the right sentence by way of Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost; as a teacher, exploring the endless ways in which words can express the contours of our thoughts. From these vantage points Murnane sees the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the everyday details of Australian life. Carrying the reader with him across the valleys, plains and grasslands of his mind, this singular author creates an immersive landscape in which every word has its own space, shape and weight.
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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.
- Read a snippet of Will Heyward and Gerald Murnane’s discussion about Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs in World Literature Magazine
- Read a great essay by author Dan Shurley over at 3:AM Magazine that links Murnane’s Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs with Duchamp’s Étant donnés.’
- You can read The New Yorker‘s profile of Gerald Murnane here.
Reviews
Melissa Harrison
Financial Times
‘An enigmatic author, possibly the best you’ve never heard of . . . His work insists on the reality of the inner world – perhaps even its primacy.’
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
'Immediately arresting.'
Ben Lerner
New Yorker
‘Murnane’s sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism.’
J.M. Coetzee
New York Review of Books
‘[For Murnane,] access to the other world – a world distinct from and in many ways better than our own – is gained neither by good works nor by grace but by giving the self up to fiction.’
The New York Times
‘Strange and wonderful and nearly impossible to describe.’
J.M. Coetzee
‘As a writer, Murnane is [thus] a radical idealist.’ J.M. Coetzee
