Description of book
David Malouf’s imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, 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.
Reviews
.. even after a long career he has lost none of his edge, and only gained power.
It is a grand achievement composed of small individual parts.
Malouf is delicate, almost loving, towards the mystery of things. He never pretends to know it all.
Success, when the writer is venturing so far, depends on control. Malouf punctures his philosophic flights with instants of subtle yet perfectly judged violence.
Malouf is a lyrical story-writer, making music of long, clause-enriched sentences, yet one of his strengths is his ability to manage contrasts. He might be thought of as a beautiful composer but those miniatures contain impulses of rude brutality.
Malcolm Knox, The Sydney Morning Herald
The beauty of language, alongside the seduction of rhythm is stamped on the prose throughout.
Carmel Bird, the Age
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.
From Booklist
He treats the spacial proscriptions of the form as a challenge to find the best way to elucidate his exploration of character. His insight into psychology is acute and expressed in beautiful metaphors. This compilation is to be savored over time. Hooper, Brad
"Malouf is one of our finest writers, a poet with an ear for language that transforms an interesting concept into a classic meditation on the role of chance in each of our lives."
--San Francisco Chronicle
“Wonderful ... These stories are compulsively readable, and while many of the locales are exotic, their inhabitants are as familiar as your own friends and family.”
-- Penthouse
"A richly imagistic writer, philosophical and literary in the best sense."
--Washington Post Book World
"A first-rate writer-a sensitive historian of the spirit."
--Wall Street Journal
"A storyteller of achievement, for whom simple things gracefully become totems for deeper thought."
--Philadelphia Inquirer
"Writing such as this . . . is rare. It is to be cherished."
--USA Today
David Malouf’s The Complete Stories 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-cantury 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 dew Australian writers.
FICTION JUDGING PANEL COMMENTS, PRIME MINISTERS LITERARY AWARD 200