Author: Randolph Stow Publisher: Text Publishing ISBN: 192225309X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
He thought of his dream, of how he had looked up out of his hole, his pit, his wolf-pit, and seen the foreign leaves, which had formed themselves into a face... Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare’s present. Julian Randolph ‘Mick’ Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished. He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite. For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award. Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’. Praise for The Girl Green as Elderflower ‘As eccentric as it is magnificently achieved.’ Geordie Williamson ‘His novels and poetry embody a uniquely rich and strange account of the land and people of Australia that we can ill afford to lose.’ Australian Book Review
Author: Suzanne Falkiner Publisher: Apollo Books ISBN: 9781742586601 Category : Authors, Australian Languages : en Pages : 916
Book Description
Randolph Stow was one of the great Australian writers of his generation. His novel To the Islands - written in his early twenties after living on a remote Aboriginal mission - won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. In later life, after publishing seven remarkable novels and several collections of poetry, Stow's literary output slowed. This biography examines the productive period as well as his long periods of publishing silence. In Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner unravels the reasons behind Randolph Stow's quiet retreat from Australia and the wider literary world. Meticulously researched, insightful and at times deeply moving, Falkiner's biography pieces together an intriguing story from Stow's personal letters, diaries, and interviews with the people who knew him best. And many of her tales - from Stow's beginnings in idyllic rural Australia, to his critical turning point in Papua New Guinea, and his final years in Essex, England - provide us with keys to unlock the meaning of Stow's rich and introspective works. *** "The overriding virtue of this book is Falkiner's steady trust in the intelligence of her readers. She spells very little out, presenting us instead with this carefully curated wealth of textual evidence." -- Kerryn Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review *** Finally we have some sense of the wounds that shaped and animated Stow's poetry and fiction." -- Geordie Williamson, The Australian *** "Suzanne Falkiner's prodigious biography of Randolph Stow is a book long awaited by many; not just the literati of his native Australia but those countless readers who feasted on his novels and wondered what kind of person could write with such imaginative power. Not only do we come to appreciate what led this renowned Australian writer to create his celebrated fictional works, but we are also given rare glimpses into the inner world of this most private individual, whose personal demons included a dependence on alcohol, two suicide attempts, and struggles with homosexuality. Falkiner cut her teeth on six previous biographies, which stood her in good stead to tackle this challenge. Against significant odds, she has done a masterful job in painting a portrait of one of Australia's most revered writers, somewhat akin to what compatriot David Marr did for Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White. It will no doubt send readers scurrying back to Stow's novels, which, as Marr once said, is the best news a biographer can hear." --World Literature Today, January-February 2017 [Subject: Biography, Literary Criticism]
Author: Randolph Stow Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press ISBN: 9780702233104 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
This masterpiece of Australian fiction was written by Randolph Stow when he was just twenty-two. It won for him the coveted Miles Franklin Award and the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature society. A work of mesmerising power, against a background of black-white fear and violence, To the Islandsjourneys towards the strange country of one man's soul. Set in the desolate outback landscape of Australia's north-west, the novel tracks the last days of a worn-out Anglican missionary. Fleeing his mission after an agonising confrontation, he immerses himself in the wilderness, searching for the isalnds of death and mystery. 'To the Islandshas acquired the status of an Australian classic. Half a century after it was written, its challenges remain central to the continuing quests of European Australians for psychic integration, and for reconciliation with indigenous Australians and with the land itself.' Anthony J. Hassall 'A novel of great originality and depth ... his writing swells with a dark power that makes it seem, in the true sense, inspired.' Encounter
Author: Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Mary Boyle Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 1843846063 Category : Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
Identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands: "Internationally Nationalist", "Someone Else's Past?", and "Activist Medievalism". Medievalism - the reception of the Middle Ages - often invokes a set of tropes generally considered 'medieval', rather than consciously engaging with medieval cultures and societies. International medievalism offers an additional interpretative layer by juxtaposing two or more national cultures, at least one of which is medieval. 'National' can be aspirational: it might refer to the area within agreed borders, or to the people who live there, but it might also describe the people who understand, or imagine, themselves to constitute a nation. And once 'medieval' becomes simply a collection of ideas, it can be re-formed as desired, cast as more geographically than historically specific, or function as a gateway to an even more nebulous past. This collection identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands, 'Internationally Nationalist', 'Someone Else's Past?', and 'Activist Medievalism', exploring medievalist media from the textual to the architectural. Subjects range from The Green Children of Woolpit to Refugee Tales, and from Viking metal to Joan of Arc. As the contributors to each section make clear, for centuries the medieval has provided material for countless competing causes and cannot be contained within historical, political, or national borders. The essays show how the medieval is repeatedly co-opted and recreated, formed as much as formative: inviting us to ask why, and in service of what.
Author: Christina Stead Publisher: Text Publishing ISBN: 1925410153 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 505
Book Description
New York, on the cusp of World War II. Robert Grant, a middle-aged businessman, lives life by his own rules. His chief hobbies are moneymaking and seduction; he is always on the hunt for the next woman to beguile and betray. That is, until he meets his match: Barbara, the ‘blondine’, a woman he cannot best. A sardonic commentary on sexual relations and war as potent as when it was first published in 1948, A Little Tea, a Little Chat holds up a mirror to the corruption and cravenness of our late-capitalist moment. Christina Stead was born in 1902 in Sydney. Stead’s first books, The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and the United States. Her fourth work, The Man Who Loved Children, has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Jonathan Franzen, among others. In total, Stead wrote almost twenty novels and short-story collections. Stead returned to Australia in 1969 after forty years abroad for a fellowship at the Australian National University. She resettled permanently in Australia in 1974 and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award that year. Christina Stead died in Sydney in 1983, aged eighty. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential Australian authors of the twentieth century. ‘[Christina Stead] is really marvellous.’ Saul Bellow ‘A sprawling character study...Callous, comical, loathsome, and tiresome, Grant also, as the David Malouf introduction notes, can sometimes stir sympathy thanks to Stead’s artistry.’ Kirkus reviews, starred review
Author: Amy Witting Publisher: Text Publishing ISBN: 1925410471 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
In The Visit—Amy Witting’s debut novel, first published when she was almost sixty—a group of Bangoree residents gather to read plays by Beckett and Brecht. But their literary pursuits, and their lives, take an unexpected turn after it is revealed that the late Roderick Fitzallan set some of his celebrated love poems in their small country town. Who is the local mystery woman who inspired Fitzallan’s verse all those years ago? Amy Witting was born in Annandale, an inner suburb of Sydney, in 1918. She attended Sydney University, then taught French and English in state schools. Beginning late in life she published six novels, including The Visit, I for Isobel, Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop and Maria’s War; two collections of short stories; two books of verse, Travel Diary and Beauty Is the Straw; and her Collected Poems. She had numerous poems and short stories published in magazines such as Quadrant and The New Yorker. Witting was awarded the 1993 Patrick White Prize. Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop won the Age Book of the Year Award. Amy Witting died in 2001. ‘Her writing is so simple and tough and direct.’ Helen Garner
Author: Thea Astley Publisher: Text Publishing ISBN: 1925626598 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Tin River is a townlet of terminal attractiveness. Tin River is a state of mind. Researching in the archives Belle discovers the long-dead Gaden Lockyer, a colonial pioneer in Jericho Flats, and soon becomes obsessed. Belle’s quest for Lockyer is her way of coming to terms with the past—her mother, ‘a drummer in her own all-women’s group’; her absent American father; and her ineffectual husband, Seb. In Reaching Tin River, Thea Astley’s satire is at its sharpest and most entertaining. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘How lucidly Ms. Astley evokes for us Australia's rough pioneer history and Belle's love for it...You will like this journey, I promise, and when it is over you will wish it weren't, and you will feel cross and want from Ms. Astley much, much more.’ New York Times ‘Dazzling imagery on every page...Beautifully written.’ Publishers Weekly ‘Intelligent, fresh, and new.’ Kirkus Reviews
Author: Geordie Williamson Publisher: Text Publishing ISBN: 1921961236 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Alarmed by the increasingly marginal status of Australian literature in the academy, Williamson has set out to reintroduce us to those key writers whose works we may have forgotten or missed altogether. His focus is on fiction that gives pleasure, and he is ardent in defence of books that for whatever reason sit uneasily in the present moment.
Author: Randolph Stow
Author: Randolph Stow
Author: Suzanne Falkiner
Author: Randolph Stow
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Author: Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Mary Boyle
Author: Christina Stead
Author: Amy Witting
Author: Thea Astley
Author: Geordie Williamson