Download or read book Tamarisk Row written by Gerald Murnane and published by Giramondo Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1974, and out of print for almost twenty years, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's first novel, and in many respects his masterpiece, an unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a Victorian country town in the late 1940s.
Download or read book Border Districts written by Gerald Murnane and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[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, which people, which books, fictional characters, turns of phrase, and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? A dark-haired woman with a wistful expression? An ancestral house in the grasslands? The colors in translucent panes of glass, in marbles and goldfish and racing silks? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloging this treasure, little knowing where his 'report' will lead and what secrets will be brought to light"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book Inland written by Gerald Murnane and published by Giramondo Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Giramondo’s publication of Barley Patch and A History of Books, Gerald Murnane has attracted renewed interest as a brilliant writer and Nobel Prize contender. First published 25 years ago, Inland is one of Murnane’s most complex and rewarding works, a study of guilt, longing and regret rich in metaphysical insights. From his native district in the Melbourne suburb of Pascoe Vale, Murnane’s narrator imagines another world, in Szolnok county Hungary, and within that world another, in Ideal South Dakota, each haunted by the betrayal of a young girl, each driven by the possibility of restitution. Murnane’s mastery over language and his pressing towards the edges of what fiction can accomplish make this book a landmark in Australian literature.
Download or read book Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs written by Gerald Murnane and published by Giramondo Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays leads into the eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.
Download or read book Last Letter to a Reader written by Gerald Murnane and published by Giramondo Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Final work by internationally acclaimed Australian author Gerald Murnane, reflecting on his career as a writer, and the fifteen books which have led critics to praise him as ‘a genius on the level of Beckett’. A book which will appeal equally to Murnane’s legion of fans, and to those new to his work, attracted by his reputation as a truly original Australian writer. In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane began a project which would round off his career as a writer – 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 archives, the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. But as the reports grew, they themselves took on the form of a book, Last Letter to a Reader. The essays on each of his works travel through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances which gave rise to the writing, images, associations, reflections on the theory of fiction, and memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration which accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving ending to what must surely be his last work as death approaches. ‘Help me, dear one, to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.’ ‘No living Australian writer, not even Les Murray, has higher claims to permanence or a richer sense of distinction’ — Sydney Morning Herald ‘The emotional conviction...is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiseled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.’ — J.M. Coetzee
Download or read book A Season on Earth written by Gerald Murnane and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterwork from Australia’s greatest cult literary figure, published for the first time as the author originally intended
Download or read book Stream System written by Gerald Murnane and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories from a mind-bending Australian master, “a genius on the level of Beckett” (Teju Cole) Never before available to readers in this hemisphere, these stories—originally published from 1985 to 2012—offer an irresistible compendium of the work of one of contemporary fiction’s greatest magicians. While the Australian master Gerald Murnane’s reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. 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. No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how—and why—we read.
Download or read book Something for the Pain written by Gerald Murnane and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-23 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, 2016 As a boy, Gerald Murnane became obsessed with horse racing. He had never ridden a horse, nor seen a race. Yet he was fascinated by photos of horse races in the Sporting Globe, and by the incantation of horses' names in radio broadcasts of races. Murnane discovered in these races more than he could find in religion or philosophy: they were the gateway to a world of imagination. Gerald Murnane is like no other writer, and Something for the Pain is like no other Murnane book. In this unique and spellbinding memoir, he tells the story of his life through the lens of horse racing. It is candid, droll and moving—a treat for lovers of literature and of the turf. Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has been a primary teacher, an editor and a university lecturer. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), was followed by nine other works of fiction, including The Plains now available as a Text Classic, and most recently A Million Windows. In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He lives in western Victoria. ‘Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.’ Teju Cole ‘Murnane is a careful stylist and a slyly comic writer with large ideas.’ Robyn Cresswell, Paris Review ‘Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced.’ Peter Craven ‘Unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today.’ Australian ‘Something for the Pain is Gerald Murnane at his best. His meticulous exploration of his lifelong obsession with horse racing is by turns hilarious, moving and profound. If Australian writing were a horse race, Murnane would be the winner by three and a half lengths.’ Andy Griffiths ‘A marvellous book about horse racing, one of the best this country has produced. It is full of fast and loose stories and colourful characters...and lots of laughs.’ Stephen Romei, Australian ‘Something for the Pain bears testament to a lifelong obsession and further illustrates the breadth and depth of meaningfulness that Murnane can draw from a seemingly straightforward spectacle.’ Australian Book Review ‘Murnane is a writer of the greatest skill and tonal control. Reading his description of the death of a racehorse in the arms of its owner-trainer at Flemington racecourse, tears rolled down my cheeks: “The man put his arms around the horse’s neck and pressed his face against the horse’s head. The man went on lying there. The light rain went on falling.”’ Financial Times ‘An absolute gem. It's literary, lucid, full of love for horses and racing and full of the strange highly-ordered madness of Murnane, full of a selfless disclosure. It’s marvellous. Funny, moving, beautiful. A brilliant book.’ Jonathan Green, Radio National Books and Arts ‘Murnane recounts his life through his abiding obsession with horse racing. But you don’t have to care about horse racing—it’s the quality of the obsessed mind that matters.’ Ben Lerner, New Yorker ‘Yes, this is about Murnane’s lifelong obsession with horseracing, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a memoir that illuminates his deliberately unusual life and his exquisite fiction.’ Australian ‘Murnane’s books are strange and wonderful and nearly impossible to describe in a sentence or two...His later works are essayistic meditations on his own past, a personal mythology as attuned to the epic ordinariness of lost time as Proust, except with Murnane it’s horse races, a boyhood marble collection, Catholic sexual hang-ups and life as a househusband in the suburban Melbourne of the 1970s.’ New York Times
Download or read book Barley Patch written by Gerald Murnane and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the Australian novelist ranked by Ladbrokes as a top-five contender for the 2010 Nobel Prize. Barley Patch takes as its subject the reasons an author might abandon fiction—or so he thinks—forever. Using the form of an oblique self-interrogation, it begins with the Beckettian question “Must I write?” and proceeds to expand from this small, personal query to fill in the details of a landscape entirely unique in world letters, a chronicle of the images from life and fiction that have endured and mingled in the author’s mind, as well as the details (and details within details) that they contain. As interested, if not more so, in the characters from his books—finished or unfinished—as with the members of his family or his daily life, the narrator lays bare the act of writing and imagining, finally giving us a glimpse of the mythical place where the characters of fiction dwell before they come into existence in books. In the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, Barley Patch is like no other fiction being written today.
Download or read book Velvet Waters written by Gerald Murnane and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paperback edition of a collection of short stories first published in 1990. Other books by this well-known author include TTasmarisk Row', TThe Plains', TLandscape with Landscape' and TInland'.
Download or read book History of Books written by Gerald Murnane and published by Giramondo Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new work by Gerald Murnane is a fictionalised autobiography told in thirty sections, each of which begins with the memory of a book that has left an image on the writer?s mind. The titles aren?t given but the reader follows the clues, recalling in the process a parade of authors, the great, the popular, and the now-forgotten. The images themselves, with their scenes of marital discord, violence and madness, or their illuminated landscapes that point to the consolations of a world beyond fiction, give new intensity to Murnane?s habitual concern with the anxieties and aspirations of the wri.
Download or read book The Plains written by Gerald Murnane and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the families of the plains—obsessed with their land and history, their culture and mythology—and of the man who ventured into their world. First published in 1982, The Plains is a mesmerising work of startling originality. This handsome new hardback edition is introduced by Ben Lerner, author of the internationally acclaimed novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, and a work of criticism, The Hatred of Poetry.
Download or read book A Million Windows written by Gerald Murnane and published by Giramondo Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new work of fiction by one of Australia’s most highly regarded authors focuses on the importance of trust, and the possibility of betrayal, in storytelling as in life. It tests the relationship established between author and reader, and on occasions of intimacy, between child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane’s fiction is woven from images, and the feelings associated with them, and the images that flit through A Million Windows like butterflies – the reflections of the setting sun like spots of golden oil, the houses of two or perhaps three storeys, the procession of dark-haired females, the clearing in the forest, the colours indigo and silver-grey, the death of a young woman who had leaped into a well – build to an emotional crescendo that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of their patterning.
Download or read book Landscape with Landscape written by Gerald Murnane and published by Giramondo Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape with Landscape is Gerald Murnane’s fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. When it was first published, thirty years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. ‘I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its early years,’ Murnane writes in his foreword to this new edition. In hindsight it can be seen to contain some of his best writing, and to offer a wide-ranging exploration of the different landscapes which make up the imagination of this extraordinary Australian writer. Five of the six loosely connected stories also trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. The sixth story, ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’, is remarkable for its depth of emotion, as it imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes.
Download or read book Gerald Murnane written by Professor Anthony Uhlmann FAHA and published by Sydney University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One coincides with a renewed interest in his work. It includes an important new essay by Murnane himself, alongside chapters by established and emerging literary critics from Australia and internationally. Together they provide a stimulating reassessment of Murnane’s diverse body of work.
Download or read book Downriver written by Heather Hansman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Green River, the most significant tributary of the Colorado River, runs 730 miles from the glaciers of Wyoming to the desert canyons of Utah. Over its course it meanders through ranches, cities, national parks, endangered fish habitats, and some of the most significant natural gas fields in the country, as it provides water for 33 million people. Stopped up by dams, slaked off by irrigation, and dried up by cities, the Green is crucial, overused, and at risk, now more than ever. Fights over the river’s water, and what’s going to happen to it in the future, are longstanding, intractable, and only getting worse as the West gets hotter and drier and more people depend on the river with each passing year. As a former raft guide and an environmental reporter, Heather Hansman knew these fights were happening, but she felt driven to see them from a different perspective—from the river itself. So she set out on a journey, in a one-person inflatable pack raft, to paddle the river from source to confluence and see what the experience might teach her. Mixing lyrical accounts of quiet paddling through breathtaking beauty with nights spent camping solo and lively discussions with farmers, city officials, and other people met along the way, Downriver is the story of that journey, a foray into the present—and future—of water in the West.
Download or read book Green Shadows and other poems written by Gerald Murnane and published by Giramondo Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerald Murnane turns to poetry at the end of his literary career, writing frank, disarming poems that traverse the rich span of his life. I esteem / above all poems or passages of prose / those that put a lump in my throat. — Gerald Murnane, ‘The Darkling Thrush’ Gerald Murnane, now in his eightieth year, began his writing career as a poet. After many years as a writer of fiction, he only returned to poetry a few years ago when he moved to Goroke, in the Western Districts of Victoria, after the death of his wife. The forty-five poems collected here are in a strikingly different mode to his fiction — without framing or digressions, and with very few images, they speak openly to the reader of the author’s memories, beliefs and experiences. They are for this reason an important addition to his internationally recognised body of fiction, most recently Border Districts and Collected Short Fiction, published by Giramondo. The poems include tributes to his mother and father and to his family, and to places that have played a formative role in his life, like Gippsland, Bendigo, Warrnambool, the Western Districts, and of course Goroke. Especially moving are his poems dedicated to authors who have influenced him — Lesbia Harford and Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Henry Handel Richardson, Marcel Proust, and with particular force, the eighteenth-century poet John Clare, who gives the collection its title, revered ‘not only for his writings / but for his losing his reason when / he was forced from the district he had wanted as his for life.’ Praise for Gerald Murnane: ‘A strong case could be made for Murnane…as the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of.’ — New York Times ‘No living Australian writer, not even Les Murray, has higher claims to permanence or a richer sense of distinction.’ — Sydney Morning Herald
