Gerald Murnane

Fiction. Born in Melbourne, Austrailia, in 1939, Gerald Murnane recently retired as the senior lecturer in fiction writing at Deakin University with a reputation as one of the finest writers in his country. He is the author of seven highly praised books of fiction, most of which are still widely unknown and underappreciated by American readers. "The Plains is parable, fable, allegory, analogue, mythology, and vision. It is also subtly satirical and often ingeniously funny . . . Gerald Murnane is unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today and THE PLAINS is a fascinating and rewarding book"--The Australian. Foreword by Andrew Zawacki, editor of VERSE magazine. The Plains was first published in Austrailia in 1982.

The Plains

Inland

Barley Patch is Gerald Murnane's first published book of fiction since 1995. It is a meditation on fiction and Murnane's own dedication to writing, and an examination of the relation between memory, image and lived experience. It is funny, self-deprecating, personal, as well as thoughtful and reflective, and enchanting in its clarity, detail and evocations of Australian life and landscape.

Barley Patch

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.

The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

Stream System

In Border Districts, 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.

A Fiction

Border Districts

Een cineast probeert het unieke karakter en de sfeer van de onafzienbare Australische vlakten in Queensland vast te leggen.

De vlakte

As Planícies

Tamarisk Row

A collection of eleven short stories by the author of TTamarisk Row' and other novels. Previously published in magazines such as TScripsi' and TMeanjin', these stories reflect a recently expressed view of Murnane's fiction: Tthere are worlds within worlds, and worlds within words'.

Velvet Waters

""The house of fiction, " wrote Henry James, "has . . . not one window, but a million." In this, his latest work, Gerald Murnane, one of Australia's most acclaimed contemporary authors, takes these words as his starting point, and asks: Who, exactly, are that house's residents, and what do they see from their respective rooms? His answer, A Million Windows, is a gorgeous (if unsettling) investigation into the glories and pitfalls of storytelling"--Amazon.com

A Million Windows

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 writing life, in the absence of religious belief. A History of Books is accompanied by three shorter pieces of fiction which play on these themes, featuring the writer at different ages, as a young boy, a teacher, and an old recluse.

A History of Books

This collection includes stories of a man who resolves to tell the truth about himself to an audience of women, and another man who searches in the hills around Melbourne for a landscape and a woman that no artist can paint

Landscape with Landscape

This collection of essays leads the reader into the curious and eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classic novel The Plains, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. Delicately argued, and finely written, they describe his dislocated youth in the suburbs of Melbourne and rural Victoria in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, his obsession with racehorses and grasslands and the Hungarian language, and above all, his dedication to the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the familiar details of Australian life.

Essays

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

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. Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has published eight previous works of fiction, Tamarisk Row (reprinted by Giramondo in 2008), A Lifetime on Clouds, The Plains, Landscape with Landscape, Inland, Velvet Waters, Emerald Blue and Barley Patch; and a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane is a recipient of the Patrick White Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature and an Emeritus Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council

“The house of fiction,” wrote Henry James, “has . . . not one window, but a million.” In this, his latest work, Gerald Murnane, one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary authors, takes these words as his starting point, and asks: Who, exactly, are that house’s residents, and what do they see from their respective rooms? His answer, A Million Windows, is a gorgeous (if unsettling) investigation into the glories and pitfalls of storytelling. Focusing on the importance of trust and the inevitability of betrayal in writing as in life, its nested stories explore the fraught relationships between author and reader, child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane’s fiction is woven from images-the reflections of the setting sun on distant windowpanes, seemingly limitless grasslands, a procession of dark-haired women, a clearing in a forest, the colors indigo and silver-grey, and the mysterious death of a young woman-which build to an emotional crescendo that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of its patterning.

Based on Murnane's own early years growing up in the Victorian country town of Bendigo, Tamarisk Row is an unsparing evocation of an impoverished Catholic childhood in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1974, and out of print for almost twenty years, Tamarisk Row is Murnane's first novel, and in many respects his masterpiece, not only because of its rich social tapestry and its evocation of the Australian landscape, but because it does magical things with language, its long sinuous sentences capturing the movements of consciousness with a suppleness unmatched in our writing. For this reason, the novel remains as fresh and vital when read today, as when it first appeared.

Tamarisk Row (16pt Large Print Edition)

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.

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

Gerald Murnane

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