The Complete Stories
Shortlist year:
2008
Shortlist category:
Fiction
Published by:
Penguin Random House
About the book
Thirty-one epic stories from Australia's award-winning author David Malouf.
David Malouf’s imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humour, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn men and intimate stories of men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on.
This is a comprehensive compilation of David’s shorter work. Stories are set in the stark and challenging Australian interior and the more lush and mysterious coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia's past.
The youthful dreams, physical desires and mental despair of Malouf's richly varied characters as they explore their place in the world are always moving and universal.
Readers won't want to skim a single page of the 31 stories in this epic collection, a few of which are novella length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a formidable craftsman's career.
About the author
David Malouf
David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including Ransom, The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award.
His most recent books are A First Place, The Writing Life and Being There.
He was born in 1934 and was brought up in Brisbane.
Judges’ comments
David Malouf's The Complete Stories (Knopf) represents one of the finest achievements in short fiction in the national literature; this from a writer who is also a celebrated poet and novelist.
Traversing a quarter century of his career, the stories insinuate us into the consciousness of individuals at points of crisis, muted or violent. The prose is eloquent, resonant, measured.
The settings transport us across countries, languages and different ways of reckoning the world with a cosmopolitan ease matched by few Australian writers.
