Originally published from 1985 to 2012, these stories offer an enthralling introduction to the work of one of contemporary fiction’s greatest magicians.
While the Australian master Gerald Murnane is best known for his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Spare, transparent and profane, they range from the haunting and mesmeric to the quietly terrifying, from ‘Finger Web’, which tells a fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny, to ‘Land Deal’, which imagines the colonisation of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams.
No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how — and why — we read.
