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The Complete Stories by David Malouf — book cover

The Complete Stories

by David Malouf
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Overview

From the internationally acclaimed Australian writer: a single volume gathering a brilliant new collection of his short fiction, Every Move You Make, and all of his previously published stories.

In the heretofore unpublished Every Move You Make: bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy--here are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent, from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons in Far North Queensland to bohemian Sydney to Ayres Rock in the Great Victoria Desert. These tender, subtle, and intimate stories give us men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others.

Heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying, The Complete Stories also includes David Malouf’s short fiction from Dream Stuff, Antipodes, and Child’s Play. It is a major literary event.

Synopsis

In this stunning collection, internationally acclaimed writer David Malouf gives us bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse. These are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent. Malouf writes about men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others. This single volume gathers both a new collection of Malouf's short fiction, Every Move You Make, and all of his previously published stories.

The New York Times - Alison McCulloch

Reading these rich, beautifully wrought stories, you can almost smell the ti trees and hear the screeching as the cockatoos take flight.

About the Author, David Malouf

David Malouf is the author of ten novels and six volumes of poetry. His novel The Great World was awarded both the prestigious Commonwealth Prize and the Prix Femina Estranger. Remembering Babylon was short-listed for the Booker Prize. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

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Editorials

Alison McCulloch

Reading these rich, beautifully wrought stories, you can almost smell the ti trees and hear the screeching as the cockatoos take flight.
—The New York Times

Library Journal

In this collection of four sets of previously published stories and one set of new stories, Malouf-winner of the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Remembering Babylon-explores our place in the world, focusing on the Queensland state of Australia. The theme of the interplay between the land and its people is introduced in the first story, "The Valley of Lagoons," in which a 16-year-old boy is finally allowed to explore this mysterious area his friends have been visiting for years and finds it changes him. In "Elsewhere," a father attending the funeral of his daughter with his son-in-law quickly learns how different life is in Sydney compared with their rural existence. In "Mrs. Porter and the Rock," a visit to Ayers Rock helps the title character understand an earlier incident in her life. Other stories examine the issue of our place in the larger scheme of things, as in "Southern Skies," in which an astronomer shows a teenage boy the mysteries of the universe. Throughout, the prose continually evokes the environment and the effect of time and place on each individual's life; for large collections.
—Joshua Cohen

Kirkus Reviews

A gathering of the short fiction-some of it not so short-of Australia's poet of loneliness. In any given story by Malouf (Dream Stuff, 2000, etc.), someone is talking past someone else; think Cheever, or possibly Kafka, in the outback, the hills echoing not with screams but silences-to say nothing of a lot of crocodile thrashing, bird squawking, joey thumping and the splashing of "the big, rain-swollen streams that begin in a thousand threadlike runnels and falls in the rainforests of the Great Divide." Often his protagonists are children, as in the boy of "At Schindler's," who must accept the fact that his father is missing in action in World War II, or the kid of "The Valley of Lagoons," forced to intercede between a would-be pal and a sister who can think of nothing but escaping the backcountry and getting to some congenial city. Malouf's adults are scarcely more able to comprehend the complexities of the world, but they try. In "War Baby," a valuable contribution to Australia's surprisingly small literature on the Vietnam War-in which many thousands of Australians fought-the central character is transformed from unsure boy to combat-grizzled veteran. Even though he is still very young, he is now experienced enough to understand the anonymity of death and "how small the pressures might be that determine the sum of what is and what we feel, the fugitive deflections and instinctive blind gestures that might be the motor of change." Change drives many of these fictions: changes of venue as lovers drift apart, changes as the once-remote scrubland spits up "a new shopping mall, with a skateboard ramp for young daredevils, two floodlit courts for night tennis and, on the river side, aHeritage Walk laid out with native hybrids"-minus, of course, aborigines, cowboys, loggers and other characters from Australia's history. A superb collection of stories that are quiet, assured, lyrical, aching.

Book Details

Published
June 1, 2008
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pages
576
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780307386038

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