ie They are  NOT coming from overseas !!

Others  Stories

- by Wayne Macauley -

ISBN: 1876044667

ISBN-13: 9781876044664  

Publisher: BLACK PEPPER, North Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia 

Published: 2010

Binding: SOFTcover  156 pages  

Condition: NEW & displayed condition! HERE in MELBOURNE! A retired display copy as illustrated!

Edition:  FIRST EDITION: 1st printing  2010

TIGHT,  SCARCE   SOFTCOVER  ~  IN  MELBOURNE  ... 

WHY do ebayers buy from US?

Because you KNOW what you're getting. My close up photos are of the actual item!!

Remains BRAND NEW &  UNread - it was the display copy instore . It is Tight -  neat, no inscriptions or marks within. Appears as in my photos - this is the exact copy!!  A nicely preserved copy - superb!

No discernible shelf wear, the interior is tight and spotlessly clean with 156 pages. THIS copy is the FIRST EDITION: Only printing from 2010 - the Australian publishing by Black Pepper, Melbourne.

Incredibly SCARCE title - this is a BRAND NEW & UNread copy!!

We also have  Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe selling in our store!  

In original SOFTcover binding, in publisher's smooth grey card covers with orange and black lettering which are in perfect condition.

(Stored with 2019!)

Measures approx.  7¾  x 4¾  inches or 21  x  14cms

SYNOPSIS ....

Wayne Macauley's Other Stories collects a variety of short fiction that he has published in literary magazines over the past 18 years. Despite the work's lengthy gestation, these stories demonstrate an impressive unity of vision, as well as an extraordinary - if uniquely Australian.

Wayne Macauley’s Other Stories is a much-awaited collection. Here at last Macauley’s peculiar take on the world is gathered together in short stories, satires, fables and anecdotes. Many are set in the hinterland of the outer suburbs where big cars, big driveways, big houses and big skies make small people feel lost and strange. This familiar world seems eerie, like a Jeffrey Smart painting. His yarns of the margins are at the centre of our culture.

Macauley’s short fiction has appeared for over a decade in our most prestigious literary magazines, including Meanjin, Overland, Westerly, Island and Griffith Review. As novelist and playwright he is one of our most original and challenging writers and a winner of The Age Short Story Competition. His two corrosive novels, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe and Caravan Story, won critical acclaim.

CONTENTS

One Night
Bohemians
Wilson’s Friends
A Short Report From Happy Valley
The Man Who Invented Television
Simpson And His Donkey Go Looking For The Inland Sea
A Hair Of The Dog
Jack The Dancer Dies
Man And Tree
The Bridge
The Streets Are Too Wide
This Bus Is Not A Tram
So Who’s The Wrecker Then?
Decency’s Grave
Reply To A Letter
The Affair In M—
The Farmer’s New Machine
The Dividing Spring
Gordon’s Leap

About the Author

Wayne Macauley is the author of the highly acclaimed novels: Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe (selling in our eBay store too!!) , Caravan Story and, most recently, The Cook, which was shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award, a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award. His new book Demons became available in August 2014. He lives in Melbourne.

Wayne Macauley is an original and independent Melbourne writer whose two novels, plays and short stories have been published to critical acclaim. Other Stories gathers together his short stories, satires, fables and anecdotes.

Very  Entertaining read!

Reviews

“Hypnotic prose style and incisive social satire, I would urge you to discover his work!” - Martin Shaw, Readings Monthly.

3RRR ….. Emmett Stinson…..  Macauley should be recognized as one of Australia’s best living writers – that he isn’t is an indictment of Australian literary culture. This is one of the best books by an Australian I’ve read all year. Do yourself a favour and go buy it now

Kaleidoscopic fiction Laurie Steed  Australian Book Review, February 2011, No. 328 ……   How to review a book that includes, as major characters, Simpson and his donkey, the Dig Tree, and a bus that may or may not be a tram? In the case of Wayne Macauley’s Other Stories, it is best to read story by story, pausing only to chart connecting themes in the cultural landscape.

MacAuley’s short fiction draws inspiration from a surprisingly broad range of influences. Adam Lindsay Gordon, Simpson, and the inland sea are all featured in his kaleidoscopic rendition of Australian history. The author also revisits suburbia, seeing the potential for both connection and disconnection in widening roads and disjointed communities.

Regardless, Other Stories is an excellent collection. There is much to admire here: lyrical, rhythmic prose melds effortlessly with Macauley’s uncanny ability to create an indelible image, and the author plays raconteur with great ease. The result is a thinking man’s compendium of quality literature, while the heart gets slightly short shrift.

The Sunday Age ….   Some of the best fiction Australia has to offer... One of Australia’s deadpan visionaries.

Shorts are back in … James Ley (critic, member of the University of Western Sydney Writing and Society Research Group)  The Weekend Australian, 13 November 2010 .......    The Australian short story has been undergoing something of a renaissance in recent years. Collections such as Cate Kennedy’s Dark Roots, Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming, Nam Le’s The Boat, Paddy O’Reilly’s The End of the World, Bob Franklin’s Under Stones and Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing (to name only a handful) is indicative of a renewal of interest in the form and the breadth of local talent.

A notable feature of tins resurgence is its spirit of playfulness. These are writers unbounded by conventional notions of realism or literary respectability, willing to experiment with genre and incorporate fanciful or offbeat concepts into their fiction.

The short story has seemingly provided a more amenable way for many contemporary authors to exploit the essential contingency of storytelling. For O’Reilly, Franklin and Cho, a robust sense of humour is an intrinsic part of this conceptual freedom.

Wayne Macauley’s Other Stories can also be placed in this category. Macauley is a seasoned writer who has published two novels, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe and Caravan Story, and has written for the theatre. Other Stories brings together short fiction written over the course of nearly two decades, most of which has appeared in a number of Australia’s literary journals.

One of the most substantial inclusions, ‘The Bridge’, is a poised and darkly ironic excursion into Coetzeean allegory, but the dominant mode, and Macauley’s true métier, is a form of slyly satirical comedy.

Each of the pieces in Other Stories is based on a quirky conceit of some kind. These are by turns strange, unreal or merely funny. Sometimes, as in the standout story, ‘The Man who Invented Television’, the concept is gleefully anachronistic. But each tale is crafted into a small, self-contained world.

The stories roam widely, but many prowl the suburbs of Melbourne, where Macauley finds plenty to whet his satirical blade. ‘Bohemians’ is a sardonic comment on the process of inner-city gentrification; ‘Wilson’s Friends’ spins the idea of a man offering to buy a schoolboy with a price tag accidentally stuck to his sleeve into an amusing fable about the economics of workplace relations; ‘So Who’s the Wrecker Then?’, in which a politician runs amok with a bulldozer, would seem to be a not-so-veiled dig at former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett.

But there is a balancing warmth to Macauley’s fiction. His barbs can be pointed but his humour is generally forgiving. Other Stories begins with a tale in which the residents of a suburban street emerge on a mild evening to sleep under the stars and end up engaged in a love-in; it ends with a fine story based on the life and suicide of poet Adam Lindsay Gordon. In between, there are frequent intimations of the great distances that can come to exist between people: ‘The Streets are Too Wide’, which is more prose poem than story, literalises the figurative distance; while Macauley’s silent protester, slowly absorbed into the tree he is trying to save, presents an image of terrible loneliness.

Yet it is the persistent and welcome note of affirmation that makes this a likable collection. In one story, a homeless man embarks on a cross-town odyssey, setting out on a quest (more Dorothean than Homeric) to find a place called Garden City so that he might ‘gather flowers for Decency’s grave’. He never gets there. He is eventually arrested while brushing his teeth with someone else’s toothbrush, having wandered into their house. The man is deluded, but by the end you are on his side. After all, going to such trouble to find flowers to put on Decency’s grave is a thoroughly decent thing to do.

Owen Richardson, The Sunday Age, 24 October 2010 (The Age Review of the Week) -  “He is one of Australia’s deadpan visionaries.”