Liars: Australian New Novelists

by Helen Daniel

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140097880
• ISBN13: 9780140097887
• Release Date: September 1988
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 383 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

a fine and detailed engagement

It is most strange that of the Australian authors of fiction discussed in this detailed and erudite book - Peter Mathers, David Foster, David Ireland, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Nicholas Hasluck, Elizabeth Jolley and Gerald Murnane - only Carey has found international success. No doubt his relocation to live outside Australia has something to do with that, as has his winning of major international awards.In a way, Helen Daniel (d.2000) has placed a parenthesis at the end of an era, when the Tall Story loomed large on the Australian horizon, expansive and surreal and full of the desperate history of European strangers in a stranger land.Once a reader has found this rich vein of tall story tellers (the Liars) and comic talent, and investigated their wonderful creativity (just as they might have been drawn to the comic fiction of central Europe, Ireland or South America), they will find an equally rewarding experience in the fictions of this era of Australian history. And after engaging with it, they might well need someone to explain its nuances, and Daniel's book is the guide to do so. Daniel's scholarship is utterly amazing, her analysis of the work of these often complex writers truly admirable, and her prose style vivid and engaging. Many of these authors are no longer in print or hard to find these days - a symptom of our less creative, less adventurous and conformist times - but books by Ireland, Mathers and Murnane at least are now available through Sydney University Press on a print to demand basis. A full list of the Classic Australian Works series is accessible on their website.