Collected Short Fiction

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.

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1939. He is the author of fifteen books, only one of which was published in the UK before And Other Stories started to publish him here in 2019 with his first book Tamarisk Row and his most latest work of prose, Border Districts. In 2020 And Other Stories publish his collected stories, Stream System, as well as a collection of his essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, though it can be hard to separate story and essay in his writing. He has won multiple high-profile awards across Australia including, most recently, the 2018 Prime Minister's Award for Border Districts. He lives in the remote village of Goroke in the north-west of Victoria, near the border with South Australia.