Gerald Murnane

Clement Killeaton transforms his fathers gambling, his mothers piety, his fellow pupils cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing and played out in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. An unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a country town in the late 1940s, Tamarisk Rows lyrical prose is charged with the yearning, boredom, fear and fascination of boyhood.First published in Australia in 1974, and previously unpublished in the UK, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnanes debut novel, and in many respects his masterpiece.

In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. 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 filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written.As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnanes own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnanes last work, as death approaches. Help me, dear one, he writes, to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.

Originally published from 1985 to 2012, these stories offer an enthralling introduction to the work of one of contemporary fictions 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.

This collection of essays leads the reader into the searching and wildly fertile imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classics Border Districts and Tamarisk Row, 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.

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, people, books, fictional characters, turns of phrase and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloguing his memories, little knowing what secrets they will yield and where his report will lead.Border Districts is a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose. Shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Award on publication in Australia, this is Murnanes first work to be published in the UK in thirty years.

"Hay muchas personas que parecen creer que lo que les pasa por la mente es una especie de película, la repetición de cosas que ya han sucedido, o de cosas que tal vez sucedan en el futuro. Y si bien es posible que algunos vean peliculas en su cabeza, la mayoria de secuencias que acuden a mi mente se parecen mas a dibujos animados, tiras comicas o cuadros surrealistas. A menudo los sonidos de una retransmision ecuestre me traen a la mente imagenes de lo que veia durante los primeros años en que oi esos mismos sonidos. Me refiero a los años que van de 1944 a 1948, cuando vivia en una casita de madera en Neale Street, en Bendigo." En estas memorias ºnicas y fascinantes, Gerald Murnane cuenta su historia a traves de una obsesion: las carreras de caballos. A pesar de no haber montado nunca a caballo ni haber visto una carrera, de niño no podia dejar de mirar las fotos de las carreras en los periodicos y le hechizaban tanto los colores de los uniformes como los nombres de los caballos que oia en la radio. Murnane descubrio en las carreras algo que no le ofrecian ambitos como el de la religion o la filosofia: la puerta de entrada al mundo de la imaginacion."

Un joven cineasta llega a una ciudad del interior de Australia con la ambición de filmar la película definitiva sobre la región, un territorio sin límites conocidos situado en la vasta zona central del pais; la pelicula pretende revelar la autentica naturaleza del paisaje de las llanuras. Mientras se documenta para escribir el guion va conociendo la cultura de la zona, las complejas rivalidades y teorias artisticas que dividieron a las llanuras en el pasado y las peculiares costumbres de los propietarios de las mansiones. Despues de obtener el favor de uno de estos terratenientes, se instala en su casa, donde una inmensa biblioteca le ofrece una nueva perspectiva de investigacion. A medida que avanza el relato, el libro se convierte, en palabras del escritor Murray Bail, en "un espejismo de territorio, recuerdo, amor y literatura". Las llanuras, publicado en 1982, es un clasico de la literatura australiana y una de las obras mas celebradas y fascinantes del autor.

Un jove cineasta arriba a una ciutat de l'interior d'Austràlia amb l’ambició de filmar la pel•lícula definitiva sobre la regió, un territori sense límits coneguts situat a la vasta zona centr