Download or read book Mick written by Suzanne Falkiner and published by Apollo Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Randolph Stow was one of the great Australian writers of his generation. His novel To the Islands - written in his early twenties after living on a remote Aboriginal mission - won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. In later life, after publishing seven remarkable novels and several collections of poetry, Stow's literary output slowed. This biography examines the productive period as well as his long periods of publishing silence. In Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner unravels the reasons behind Randolph Stow's quiet retreat from Australia and the wider literary world. Meticulously researched, insightful and at times deeply moving, Falkiner's biography pieces together an intriguing story from Stow's personal letters, diaries, and interviews with the people who knew him best. And many of her tales - from Stow's beginnings in idyllic rural Australia, to his critical turning point in Papua New Guinea, and his final years in Essex, England - provide us with keys to unlock the meaning of Stow's rich and introspective works. *** "The overriding virtue of this book is Falkiner's steady trust in the intelligence of her readers. She spells very little out, presenting us instead with this carefully curated wealth of textual evidence." -- Kerryn Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review *** Finally we have some sense of the wounds that shaped and animated Stow's poetry and fiction." -- Geordie Williamson, The Australian *** "Suzanne Falkiner's prodigious biography of Randolph Stow is a book long awaited by many; not just the literati of his native Australia but those countless readers who feasted on his novels and wondered what kind of person could write with such imaginative power. Not only do we come to appreciate what led this renowned Australian writer to create his celebrated fictional works, but we are also given rare glimpses into the inner world of this most private individual, whose personal demons included a dependence on alcohol, two suicide attempts, and struggles with homosexuality. Falkiner cut her teeth on six previous biographies, which stood her in good stead to tackle this challenge. Against significant odds, she has done a masterful job in painting a portrait of one of Australia's most revered writers, somewhat akin to what compatriot David Marr did for Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White. It will no doubt send readers scurrying back to Stow's novels, which, as Marr once said, is the best news a biographer can hear." --World Literature Today, January-February 2017 [Subject: Biography, Literary Criticism]
Download or read book To the Islands written by Randolph Stow and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This masterpiece of Australian fiction was written by Randolph Stow when he was just twenty-two. It won for him the coveted Miles Franklin Award and the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature society. A work of mesmerising power, against a background of black-white fear and violence, To the Islandsjourneys towards the strange country of one man's soul. Set in the desolate outback landscape of Australia's north-west, the novel tracks the last days of a worn-out Anglican missionary. Fleeing his mission after an agonising confrontation, he immerses himself in the wilderness, searching for the isalnds of death and mystery. 'To the Islandshas acquired the status of an Australian classic. Half a century after it was written, its challenges remain central to the continuing quests of European Australians for psychic integration, and for reconciliation with indigenous Australians and with the land itself.' Anthony J. Hassall 'A novel of great originality and depth ... his writing swells with a dark power that makes it seem, in the true sense, inspired.' Encounter
Download or read book The Merry go round in the Sea written by Randolph Stow and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1941, Rob Coram is six. The war feels far removed from his world of aunties and cousins and the beautiful, dry landscape of Geraldton in Western Australia. But when his favourite, older cousin, Rick, leaves to join the army, the war takes a step closer. When Rick returns from the war several years later, he has changed and Rob feels betrayed. The old merry-go-round that represents Rob's dream of utopia (the security of his family and of the land that is his home) begins to disintegrate before his eyes.
Download or read book The Girl Green as Elderflower written by Randolph Stow and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He thought of his dream, of how he had looked up out of his hole, his pit, his wolf-pit, and seen the foreign leaves, which had formed themselves into a face... Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare’s present. Julian Randolph ‘Mick’ Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished. He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite. For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award. Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’. Praise for The Girl Green as Elderflower ‘As eccentric as it is magnificently achieved.’ Geordie Williamson ‘His novels and poetry embody a uniquely rich and strange account of the land and people of Australia that we can ill afford to lose.’ Australian Book Review
Download or read book Visitants written by Randolph Stow and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I want to die. I do not want to be mad...It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come, and attacked the person who lived there. After an Australian patrol officer commits suicide on a remote New Guinea island in 1959, five witnesses are called to a government inquiry. Each has a disturbing story to tell: strand by strand, the mystery of the officer’s past is unravelled. But what of other visitants, like the unidentified flying object and the cargo cult it has inspired on the island? Informed by Randolph Stow’s experiences, Visitants is an original, astonishing investigation of colonialism.
Download or read book Randolph Stow written by Kate Leah Rendell and published by . This book was released on 2021-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Randolph Stow (1935-2010) was a writer who resisted critical containment. His complete oeuvre of eight novels, a children's novella, a libretto, translation work and several collections of poetry presents an accomplished and impressive literary legacy. The collection republishes a number of significant essays but also presents new readings acknowledging the remarkable skill as well as the limitations of Stow's literary imagining. All are a testimony to the resonance of Stow's writing while acknowledging the critical complexities of his work. 'Commencing this project with the simple ambition to present a critical collection responding to the full breadth of Randolph Stow's work, I extended an invitation to literary scholars and critics whose work I knew addressed his writing. The responses were encouraging and generous, confirming the wide reach of interest in Stow's life and literature. It reminded me that while not as comprehensively studied as some of his contemporaries, Stow continues to enjoy the support of broad public and academic readership.' -- Kate Rendell
Download or read book Midnite written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Banjawarn written by Josh Kemp and published by UWA Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Garreth Hoyle is a true crime writer whose destructive love affair with hallucinogenic drugs has sent him searching for ghosts in the unforgiving mallee desert of Western Australia. Heading north through Kalgoorlie, he attempts to score off old friends from his shearing days on Banjawarn Station. His journey takes an unexpected detour when he discovers an abandoned ten-year-old girl and decides to return her to her estranged father in Leonora, instead of alerting authorities. Together they begin the road trip from hell through the scorched heart of the state’s northern goldfields. Love, friendship and hope are often found in the strangest places, but forgiveness is never simple, and the past lies buried just beneath the blood red topsoil. The only question is whether Hoyle should uncover it, or run as fast as his legs can take him. Banjawarn is an unsettling debut from Josh Kemp, winner of the 2021 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Echoing Cormac McCarthy’s haunting border trilogy and narrative vernacular that recalls the sparse lyricism of Randolph Stow and Tim Winton, this is a darkly funny novel that earns its place amongst the stable of Australian gothic fiction.
Download or read book Only Happiness Here written by Gabrielle Carey and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: &‘When I discovered Elizabeth von Arnim, I found, for the first time, a writer who wrote about being happy.' Elizabeth von Arnim is one of the early twentieth century's most famous &– and almost forgotten &– authors. She was ahead of her time in her understanding of women and their often thwarted pursuit of happiness. Born in Sydney in the mid-1800s, she went on to write many internationally bestselling novels, marry a Prussian Count and then an English Lord, develop close friendships with H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster, and raise five children. Intrigued by von Arnim's extraordinary life, Gabrielle Carey sets off on a literary and philosophical journey to learn about this bold and witty author. More than a biography, Only Happiness Here is also a personal investigation into our perennial obsession with finding joy.
Download or read book A Haunted Land written by Randolph Stow and published by . This book was released on 1956 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Moving Among Strangers written by Gabrielle Carey and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two literary lives defined by storytelling and secrets As her mother Joan lies dying, Gabrielle Carey writes a letter to Joan’s childhood friend, the reclusive novelist Randolph Stow. This letter sets in motion a literary pilgrimage that reveals long-buried family secrets. Like her mother, Stow had grown up in Western Australia. After early literary success and a Miles Franklin Award win in 1958 for his novel To the Islands, he left for England and a life of self-imposed exile. Living most of her life on the east coast, Gabrielle was also estranged from her family’s west Australian roots, but never questioned why. A devoted fan of Stow’s writing, she becomes fascinated by his connection with her extended family, but before she can meet him he dies. With only a few pieces of correspondence to guide her, Gabrielle embarks on a journey from the red-dirt landscape of Western Australia to the English seaside town of Harwich in a quest to understand her family’s past and Stow’s place in it. Moving Among Strangers is a celebration of one of Australia’s most enigmatic and visionary writers.
Download or read book Eyrie written by Tim Winton and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award An exhilarating new book from Australia's most acclaimed writer Tim Winton is Australia's most decorated and beloved literary novelist. Short-listed twice for the Booker Prize and the winner of a record four Miles Franklin Awards for Best Australian Novel, he has a gift for language virtually unrivaled among English-language novelists. His work is both tough and tender, primordial and new—always revealing the raw, instinctual drives that lure us together and rend us apart. In Eyrie, Winton crafts the story of Tom Keely, a man struggling to accomplish good in an utterly fallen world. Once an ambitious, altruistic environmentalist, Keely now finds himself broke, embroiled in scandal, and struggling to piece together some semblance of a life. From the heights of his urban high-rise apartment, he surveys the wreckage of his life and the world he's tumbled out of love with. Just before he descends completely into pills and sorrow, a woman from his past and her preternatural child appear, perched on the edge of disaster, desperate for help. When you're fighting to keep your head above water, how can you save someone else from drowning? As Keely slips into a nightmarish world of con artists, drug dealers, petty violence, and extortion, Winton confronts the cost of benevolence and creates a landscape of uncertainty. Eyrie is a thrilling and vertigo-inducing morality tale, at once brutal and lyrical, from one of our finest storytellers.
Download or read book Rising from the Rails written by Larry Tye and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2005-06-01 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A valuable window into a long-underreported dimension of African American history."—Newsday An engaging social history that reveals the critical role Pullman porters played in the struggle for African American civil rights When George Pullman began recruiting Southern blacks as porters in his luxurious new sleeping cars, the former slaves suffering under Jim Crow laws found his offer of a steady job and worldly experience irresistible. They quickly signed up to serve as maid, waiter, concierge, nanny, and occasionally doctor and undertaker to cars full of white passengers, making the Pullman Company the largest employer of African American men in the country by the 1920s. In the world of the Pullman sleeping car, where whites and blacks lived in close proximity, porters developed a unique culture marked by idiosyncratic language, railroad lore, and shared experience. They called difficult passengers "Mister Charlie"; exchanged stories about Daddy Jim, the legendary first Pullman porter; and learned to distinguish generous tippers such as Humphrey Bogart from skinflints like Babe Ruth. At the same time, they played important social, political, and economic roles, carrying jazz and blues to outlying areas, forming America's first black trade union, and acting as forerunners of the modern black middle class by virtue of their social position and income. Drawing on extensive interviews with dozens of porters and their descendants, Larry Tye reconstructs the complicated world of the Pullman porter and the vital cultural, political, and economic roles they played as forerunners of the modern black middle class. Rising from the Rails provides a lively and enlightening look at this important social phenomenon. • Named a Recommended Book by The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Seattle Times
Download or read book The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith written by Thomas Keneally and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tormented and humiliated mixed-race Australian man reaches his breaking point and takes terrifying revenge on his abusers in this critically acclaimed novel based on actual events In Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, Jimmie Blacksmith is desperate to figure out where he belongs. Half-Anglo and half-Aboriginal, he feels out of place in both cultures. Schooled in the ways of white society by a Protestant missionary, Jimmie forsakes tribal customs, adopts the white man’s religion, marries a white woman, and seeks a life of honest labor in a world Aborigines are normally barred from entering. But he will always be seen as less than human by the employers who cheat and exploit him, the fellow workers who deride him, and the wife who betrays him—and a man can only take so much. Driven by hopelessness, rage, and despair, Jimmie commits a series of savage and terrible acts of vengeance and becomes something he never thought he’d be: a murderer, a fugitive, and, ultimately, a legend. Based on shocking real-life events, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a powerful tale of racism, identity, intolerance, and murder from the celebrated bestselling author of Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally. This magnificent historical novel remains a stunning, provocative, and profoundly affecting reading experience.
Download or read book The Novels of Randolph Stow written by Leonie Kramer and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Strange Country written by Patrick McCaughey and published by Miegunyah Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Painting matters to Australia and Australians as it does in few other countries. It has formed our consciousness, our sense of where we come from, and who we are. It cries out for wider recognition and acknowledgement.' - Patrick McCaughey Why has Australia, an island continent with a small population, produced such original and powerful art? And why is it so little known beyond our shores? Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters is Patrick McCaughey's answer.
