Download or read book Illywhacker written by Peter Carey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 1119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character—espcially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.

Download or read book Illywhacker written by Peter Carey and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herbert Badgery is vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch. He might very well be the embodiment of Australia’s national character, especially in its fondness for tall stories and questionable history. As this charming scoundrel traverses the continent and a century’s worth of outlandish encounters – not least with a genteel dowager fending off madness with an electric belt, and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts – one truth emerges. Herbert Badgery may in fact be the king of all con men.

Download or read book Illywhacker written by Peter Carey and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 902 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illywhacker is a confidence trickster, and Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of this dazzling comic novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery travels across the Australian continent and a century in a picaresque novel full of outlandish encounters and dangerous characters. Overflowing with magic, jokes and inventions, Illywhacker is a contemporary classic.

Download or read book Parrot and Olivier in America written by Peter Carey and published by Random House Canada. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author: an irrepressible, audacious, trenchantly funny new novel set in the 19th century and inspired in part by the life of Alexis de Tocqueville. With dazzling exuberance and all the richness of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer, Peter Carey explores the birth of democracy, the limits of friendship and whether people really can remake themselves in a New World. The two men at the heart of the novel couldn't be any more different: Olivier is the son of French aristocrats who (barely) survived the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerate English printer. But when young Parrot is separated from his father (after a stupendous conflagration at a house of forgery) he runs into the powerful embrace of a one-armed marquis who will be his conduit - like it or not - into a life as closely (mis)allied with Olivier's as if they were connected by blood. And when Olivier sets sail for America - ostensibly to make a study of the American penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from the latest guillotineurs - Parrot, unable to loosen the Marquis's grip, is there too: as spy, scribe, comptroller, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative unfurls, shifting between the perspectives of Olivier and Parrot, between their picaresque adventures apart and together, in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands - a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold.

Download or read book True History of the Kelly Gang written by Peter Carey and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-22 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SOONTO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The international bestseller, Booker Prize winner, and winner of the 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Out of 19th century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations: Ned Kelly, the son of poor Irish immigrants, viewed by the authorities as a thief (especially of horses) and, as a cold-blooded killer. To the people, though, he was a patriot hounded unfairly by rich English landlords and their stooges. In the end, Kelly and his so-called gang (his younger brother and two friends) led a massive police manhunt on a wild goose chase that lasted twenty months, in which Ned’s talents as a bushman were augmented by bank robberies and the support of nearly everyone not in a uniform. His one demand – for which he would have surrendered himself was his jailed mother’s freedom. Executed by hanging more than a century ago, speaking as if from the grave, Kelly still resonates as the most potent legend in the land down under.

Download or read book Bliss written by Peter Carey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-07-06 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear in this darkly funny novel, death is sometimes a necessary prelude to real life. Part The Wizard of Oz, part Dante's Inferno, and part Australian Book of the Dead, Bliss is a triumph of uninhibited storytelling from a writer of extravagan gifts.

Download or read book My Life as a Fake written by Peter Carey and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melbourne, the late 1940s. A young conservative Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the most avant-garde of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working-class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of Chubb's imagination. Not only does the magazine fall for the hoax, but the local authorities also sue its editor for publishing obscenity. At the trial someone uncannily resembling the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle, leaps to his feet. At this moment a horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being he has himself manufactured...

Download or read book Oscar and Lucinda written by Peter Carey and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-12-22 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Carey's novel of the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier is both a moving and beautiful love story and a historical tour de force set in Victorian times. Made for each other, the two are gamblers - one obsessive, the other compulsive - incapable of winning at the game of love.Oscar and Lucinda is now available as a Faber Modern Classics edition.

Download or read book Theft A Love Story written by Peter Carey and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones, and his 'damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother' Hugh, Theft: A Love Story once again displays Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, friendship and redemption.

Download or read book Fat Man in History written by Peter Carey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If, in some post-Marxist utopia, obesity were declared counterrevolutionary, how would a houseful of fat men strike back? If it were possible to win a new body by lottery, what kind of people would choose ugliness? If two gun-toting thugs decided to take over a business -- and run it through sheer terror -- how far would their methods take them? These are the questions that Peter Carey, author of The Tax Inspector and Oscar and Lucinda, brilliantly explores in this collection of stories. Exquisitely written and thoroughly envisioned, the tales in The Fat Man in History reach beyond their arresting premises to utter deep and often frightening truths about our brightest and darkest selves.

Download or read book Fabulating Beauty written by Andreas Gaile and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Carey is one of Australia's finest creative writers, much admired by both literary critics and a worldwide reading public. While academia has been quick to see his fictions as exemplars of postcolonial and postmodern writing strategies, his general readership has been captivated by his deadpan sense of humour, his quirky characters, the outlandish settings and the grotesqueries of his intricate plots. After three decades of prolific writing and multiple award-winning, Carey stands out in the world of Australian letters as designated heir to Patrick White. Fabulating Beauty pays tribute to Carey's literary achievement. It brings together the voices of many of the most renowned Carey critics in twenty essays (sixteen commissioned especially for this volume), an interview with the author, as well as the most extensive bibliography of Carey criticism to date. The studies represent a wide range of current perspectives on the writer's fictions. Contributors focus on issues as diverse as the writer's biography; his use of architectural metaphors; his interrogation of narrative structures such as myths and cultural master-plots; intertextual strategies; concepts of sacredness and references to the Christian tradition; and his strategies of rewriting history. Amidst predictions of the imminent death of 'postist' theory, the essays all attest to the ongoing relevance of the critical parameters framed by postmodernism and postcolonialism.

Download or read book Peter Carey written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Carey, writer of such celebrated works as Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang, and His Illegal Self, is one of Australia's most critically acclaimed novelists. Deeply concerned with South Pacific culture, especially the lives of its most downtrodden citizens, Carey uses popular art as a tool for raising the consciousness of readers. This book provides an introduction to the author's life, as well as a guided overview of his body of work. Designed for the fan and scholar alike, this text features an alphabetized, fully-annotated listing of major terms in the Carey canon, including fictional characters, motifs, historical events, and themes. Additional features include a listing of headwords, a Carey history, 44 reading and writing topics, and bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. A comprehensive index is included.

Download or read book His Illegal Self written by Peter Carey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-02-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven-year-old Che Selkirk was raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. The son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties, Che has grown up with the hope that one day his parents will come back for him. So when a woman arrives at his front door and whisks him away to the jungles of Queensland, he is confronted with the most important questions of his life: Who is his real mother? Did he know his real father? And if all he suspects is true, what should he do? In this artful tale of a young boy's journey, His Illegal Self lifts your spirit in the most unexpected way.

Download or read book The Tax Inspector written by Peter Carey and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Granny Catchprice, who runs her family business -- and her family -- with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire -- and himself into an angel -- the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamozovs. But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey's hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.

Download or read book A Long Way From Home written by Peter Carey and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the 2019 International DUBLIN Literary AwardLonglisted for the 2019 Walter Scott Historical Fiction PrizeIrene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in rural south eastern Australia. Together with Willie, their lanky navigator, they embark upon the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive.A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey's late style masterpiece; a thrilling high speed story that starts in one way, then takes you to another place altogether. Set in the 1950s in the embers of the British Empire, painting a picture of Queen and subject, black, white and those in-between, this brilliantly vivid novel illustrates how the possession of an ancient culture spirals through history - and the love made and hurt caused along the way.

Download or read book Just Relations written by Rodney Hall and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once a wild goldmining town, Whitey's Fall is now a small, brooding community of close and distant relations. One by one, the young are leaving for the alluring uncertainties of the world beyond. The old stay on, steadfast in their pride and sense of belonging. Remembering is their religion; the mountain is their altar. They are the guardians of the land's unbroken promise. But time brings strangers with different dreams, a different sense of justice. And their coming is a violation, a breakfast for parasites.

Download or read book Jack Maggs written by Peter Carey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda returns to the nineteenth century in an utterly captivating mystery. The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation. Installing himself within the household of the genteel grocer Percy Buckle, Maggs soon attracts the attention of a cross section of London society. Saucy Mercy Larkin wants him for a mate. The writer Tobias Oates wants to possess his soul through hypnosis. But Maggs is obsessed with a plan of his own. And as all the various schemes converge, Maggs rises into the center, a dark looming figure, at once frightening, mysterious, and compelling. Not since Caleb Carr's The Alienist have the shadowy city streets of the nineteenth century lit up with such mystery and romance.