Gerald Murnane Book order

Exploring the enduring images in the author's mind, the narrative delves into a diverse range of memories and reflections, from childhood experiences to fantastical elements. Notable figures include Mandrake the Magician and a mysterious woman, alongside personal recollections like a cousin's dollhouse and a childhood incident with a bachelor uncle. The work reflects a profound inquiry into the nature of these vivid images, marking a significant return to fiction after a long hiatus.

Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator's imagination--from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator's own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. "No thing in the world is one thing," he declares; "some places are many more than one place." These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs--fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green--and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close.

In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane--perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose--began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. 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 filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnane's own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnane's last work, as death approaches. "Help me, dear one," he writes, "to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven."

A masterful collection of essays from one of Australia's most searching and expert writers.

Never before available to readers in the UK, these brilliant and idiosyncratic short stories stand alongside the fictions of Borges, Beckett and Nabokov.

A lonely child of unusual sensibility inherits his father's love of horse- racing and his mother's Catholicism in this evocative, semi-autobiographical novel.

Border Districts, purportedly the Australian master Gerald Murnane's final work of fiction, is a hypnotic, precise, self-lacerating report' on a life led as an avid reader, fumbling lover, student of mental imagery', and devout believer in the luminescence of memory and of literature.

What he had been searching for was not the perfect religious order but the perfect landscape…From that moment on he was a poet in search of his ideal landscape.Lost to the world for more than four decades, A Season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane: the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains.A Season on Earth is Murnane’s second novel as it was intended to be, bringing together all of its four sections—the first two of which were published as A Lifetime on Clouds in 1976 and the last two of which have never been in print.A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A Lifetime on Clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane’s fiction. That is because, as Murnane writes in his foreword, it is ‘only half a book and Adrian Sherd only half a character’.Here, at last, is sixteen-year-old Adrian’s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars and idealised visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic novice, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature and landscapes.Adrian Sherd is one of the great comic creations in Australian writing, and A Season on Earth is a revelatory portrait of the artist as a young man.

"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."--Amazon.com.

Exploring the complexities of storytelling, this book offers a multifaceted reflection on its beauty and challenges. It delves into the ways narratives shape our understanding of the world, highlighting both the transformative power of tales and the potential dangers they pose. Through vivid imagery and insightful commentary, it invites readers to consider the impact of stories on personal and collective experiences, making it a thought-provoking read for anyone interested in the art of narrative.