{"title":"Books by Gerald Murnane","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781913505820","title":"Inland","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eInland\u003c\/em\u003e is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator’s imagination – from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator’s own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. ‘No thing in the world is one thing,’ he declares; ‘some places are many more than one place.’ These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs – fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green – and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43595622482098,"sku":"9781913505820","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913505820_6d6afb04-7904-4c49-bd6c-3fa56698bcee.jpg?v=1786030385"},{"product_id":"9781916751149","title":"Barley Patch","description":"\u003cp\u003ePublished in Australia in 2009, \u003cem\u003eBarley Patch\u003c\/em\u003e was Murnane's first book in fourteen years, written after a period in which he had thought he would never write fiction again. The book begins with the question, ‘Must I write?’ What follows is both a chronicle of the images that have endured in the author’s mind and an exploration of their nature. The clarity of the images is extraordinary, as is their range, from Mandrake the Magician to the bachelor uncle kicked in the ‘stones’ as a child, from a cousin’s doll’s house to the mysterious woman who lets her hair down, from the soldier beetle who winks messages from God to the racehorses that run forever in the author’s mind.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe narrator lays bare the acts 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. With something of the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, this is a cornerstone of Murnane's unclassifiable project, for which he is a deserving Nobel Prize candidate.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘A genius.’ Teju Cole\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54926546665845,"sku":"9781916751149","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916751149_06df6070-0843-494d-a89d-21828f3e06e5.jpg?v=1786030700"},{"product_id":"9781911508663","title":"Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs","description":"\u003cp\u003e‘Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing.’ \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eBorder Districts\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eTamarisk Row\u003c\/i\u003e, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He writes of himself: as a boy making racehorses of his marbles, an obsession shared with Jack Kerouac; as a writer, working his first ten years in secret; as a reader, trying to understand the mystery of the right sentence by way of Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost; as a teacher, exploring the endless ways in which words can express the contours of our thoughts. From these vantage points Murnane sees the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the everyday details of Australian life. Carrying the reader with him across the valleys, plains and grasslands of his mind, this singular author creates an immersive landscape in which every word has its own space, shape and weight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e'Murnane's sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism.' Ben Lerner, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308550304117,"sku":"9781911508663","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911508663_2b9baff6-2c67-430f-873c-11cf0987e787.jpg?v=1786034431"},{"product_id":"9781911508649","title":"Collected Short Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003eOriginally published between 1985 and 2012, these stories offer an enthralling introduction to the work of one of contemporary fiction’s greatest magicians, and a map of Gerald Murnane’s evolution as a writer. Spare, transparent and profane, This career-spanning volume ranges from ‘Finger Web’, a fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny, to ‘Land Deal’, which imagines Australia’s colonisation and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams, to ‘The Interior of Gaaldine’, a story which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself, and which points the way toward Murnane’s later works, from \u003ci\u003eBarley Patch\u003c\/i\u003e to \u003ci\u003eBorder Districts\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With potent style and determined vision, Murnane creates sensitive portraits of intimate relationships – with parents, uncles and aunts, and particularly children – and probes each situation for anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight. Murnane treats emotions and thoughts as he does minor objects: he shines light through them and makes them new, remaking the vessel of literature as he goes. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e'Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett' Teju Cole\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'A voice so clear, so unaffected, that it's a voice for everyone' Benjamin H. Ogden,\u003ci\u003e The New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'The sentences are laid on like varnish, coat after coat, until the text gleams with a high shine. Immaculate in its unadorned plainness...his prose achieves a crystalline beauty.' \u003ci\u003e The New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308922286453,"sku":"9781911508649","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911508649_46d3504a-8ccb-48f3-b55c-e49f2f1d8aa7.jpg?v=1786029000"},{"product_id":"9781911508366","title":"Tamarisk Row","description":"\u003cp\u003eClement Killeaton transforms his father’s gambling, his mother’s 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, \u003cem\u003eTamarisk Row’s\u003c\/em\u003e lyrical prose is charged with the yearning, boredom, fear and fascination of boyhood.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFirst published in Australia in 1974, and previously unpublished in the UK, \u003cem\u003eTamarisk Row\u003c\/em\u003e is Gerald Murnane’s debut novel, and in many respects his masterpiece.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309050638709,"sku":"9781911508366","price":11.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911508366_669ecd7c-606f-4c71-a620-80eeb6c22578.jpg?v=1786028989"},{"product_id":"9781913505424","title":"Last Letter to a Reader","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, \u003cem\u003ea book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. \u003c\/em\u003eThese 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 Murnane’s own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on \u003cem\u003eLast Letter to a Reader\u003c\/em\u003e itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnane’s last work, as death approaches.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313165742453,"sku":"9781913505424","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913505424_5fc37667-45cd-464a-9dd5-f8680b3cf6f1.jpg?v=1786035208"},{"product_id":"9781916751378","title":"Landscape with Landscape","description":"\u003cp\u003eFive of the six stories in \u003cem\u003eLandscape with Landscape\u003c\/em\u003e trace a suburban journey in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. In the sixth story a Paraguayan man imagines a country called Australia, while his son sickens before his eyes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Murnane is unlike anyone else, the sort of writer who demands to be read in a new way but, above all, demands to be read.’ Brian Evenson, \u003cem\u003eChicago Review of Books\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘The emotional conviction . . . is so intense, the sombre lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiselled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.’ J. M. Coetzee\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56369368662389,"sku":"9781916751378","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916751378_2d800015-12e5-4c13-86b8-c1a2a5be43aa.jpg?v=1786030715"},{"product_id":"border-districts","title":"Border Districts","description":"\u003cp\u003eA 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBorder Districts\u003c\/em\u003e is a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose. Winner of the Australian 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Award, this is Murnane’s first work to be published in the UK in thirty years.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57490369872245,"sku":"9781911508380","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911508380.jpg?v=1786442266"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-gerald-murnane.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}