This collection of essays leads into the eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.

First published in 1974, and out of print for almost twenty years, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's first novel, and in many respects his masterpiece, an unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a Victorian country town in the late 1940s.

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.

"[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"--Amazon.com.

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.

This new work of fiction by one of Australia’s most highly regarded authors focuses on the importance of trust, and the possibility of betrayal, in storytelling as in life. It tests the relationship established between author and reader, and on occasions of intimacy, between child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane’s fiction is woven from images, and the feelings associated with them, and the images that flit through A Million Windows like butterflies – the reflections of the setting sun like spots of golden oil, the houses of two or perhaps three storeys, the procession of dark-haired females, the clearing in the forest, the colours indigo and silver-grey, the death of a young woman who had leaped into a well – build to an emotional crescendo that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of their patterning.

Final work by internationally acclaimed Australian author Gerald Murnane, reflecting on his career as a writer, and the fifteen books which have led critics to praise him as ‘a genius on the level of Beckett’. A book which will appeal equally to Murnane’s legion of fans, and to those new to his work, attracted by his reputation as a truly original Australian writer. In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane began a project which would round off his career as a writer – 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 archives, the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. But as the reports grew, they themselves took on the form of a book, Last Letter to a Reader. The essays on each of his works travel through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances which gave rise to the writing, images, associations, reflections on the theory of fiction, and memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration which accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving ending to what must surely be his last work as death approaches. ‘Help me, dear one, to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.’ ‘No living Australian writer, not even Les Murray, has higher claims to permanence or a richer sense of distinction’ — Sydney Morning Herald ‘The emotional conviction...is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiseled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.’ — J.M. Coetzee