Author of the Month: Gerald Murnane
Selected by the Bookshop
Our first Author of the Month for 2024 is Gerald Murnane.
A true Australian original, Murnane is constantly returning to and reinvigorating his central themes – place, memory, landscape, horse-racing – across novels, short stories, poetry, autobiographical non-fiction and (in one case) a 1600-word palindrome. Emmett Stinson has described Murnane as ‘an Australian avant-garde of one’; his astonishing novel Inland, just reissued by his UK publisher And Other Stories, is an excellent point of entry into his world.
From the publisher:
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…
From the publisher:
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…
From the publisher:
‘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…
From the publisher:
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…
From the publisher:
Clement Killeaton transforms his father’s gambling, his mother’s piety, his fellow pupils’ cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing and played out in the…
From the publisher:
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, people,…
Recommended by John
‘Eccentric, humane and funny – there’s no-one better than Murnane for tracking the intricacies and distortions of memory. Read this first, and then if you like it, try the brilliant long novel Tamarisk Row.’
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