Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

This collection of essays leads the reader into the searching and wildly fertile imagination of Gerald Murnane, a master of contemporary Australian writing, author of Border Districts and Tamarisk Row , and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. He writes of himself: as boy making racehorses of his marbles, an obsession shared with Jack Kerouac; as a writer, working his first ten years in secret; as a reader, trying to understand the mystery of the right sentence by way of Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost; as a teacher, exploring the endless ways in which words can express the contours of our thoughts. Carrying the reader with him across the valleys, plains and grasslands of his mind, this singular author creates an immersive landscape in which every word has its own space, shape and weight. This collection of essays leads the reader into the searching and wildly fertile imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classics Border Districts and Tamarisk Row , and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. Delicately argued and finely written, they describe his dislocated youth in the suburbs of Melbourne and rural Victoria in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, his obsession with racehorses and grasslands and the Hungarian language, and above all, his dedication to the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the familiar details of Australian life. Coming of age;Catholicism;horse racing;Teju Cole;J M Coetzee;Ben Lerner;Lidija Haas;childhood;Australia;Prime Minister’s Award for Literature;Patrick White A masterful collection of essays from one of Australia's most searching and expert writers.