A deeply personal, behind-the-scenes exploration of Alex Miller's six-decade writing life. A Kind of Confession is a secret look into Alex Miller's writing life, spanning sixty years of creativity and inspiration. As a young man in 1961 Miller left his work as a ringer in Queensland and set out to achieve his dream of becoming a serious novelist. It was not until 1988 that his first novel, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain, was published. Twelve more novels would follow, all bestsellers, many published internationally. This selection from his notebooks and letters makes it exhilaratingly evident that Miller has been devoted to finding and telling stories that are profound, substantial and entertaining, stories that capture both intellect and emotion. Miller's fascinating life is told in a personal, behind-the-scenes exploration of his struggle to become a published writer, his determination, his methods of creative thought and the sources of his inspiration. His writing, sometimes in anger and despair, sometimes with humour and joy, whether created for publication or for private meditation, is alive with ideas, moral choices, commentary, encouragement, criticism and love.
A moving novel about storytelling, about truths, and love, from twice Miles Franklin Award winner Alex Miller. 'More than one ghost haunts this tender novel about love in its many guises, condoned and illicit. In his deceptively simple, lucid prose, Alex Miller examines the emotional contradictions inherent in apparent opposites as his central character learns to draw strength and inspiration from unlikely places. Hauntingly beautiful, A Brief Affair will resonate long after its pages are closed.' Sylvia Martin, author of Ink in Her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer From the bustling streets of China, to the ominous Cell 16 in an old asylum building, to the familiar sounds and sight of galahs flying over a Victorian farm, A Brief Affair is a tender love story. On the face of it, Dr Frances Egan is a woman who has it all - a loving family and a fine career - until a brief, perfect affair reveals to her an imaginative dimension to her life that is wholly her own. Fran finds the courage and the inspiration to risk everything and change her direction at the age of forty-two. This newfound understanding of herself is fortified by the discovery of a long-forgotten diary from the asylum and the story it reveals. Written with humour, sensitivity and the wisdom for which Miller's work is famous, this exquisitely compassionate novel explores the interior life and the dangerous navigation of love in all its forms. '...richly satisfying and luminous' Emeritus Professor, Tom Griffiths
An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity. SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY AWARD 'Max is haunted by devastating insights. Blatt told Miller that the hardest part of torture was the realisation that the torturer was also your brother. It is the same generosity that makes Max such a compelling argument against narrowness and division. Blatt's life has deep and wide ramifications. Miller's intelligent love has created a tale for the ages.' The Age 'This book so beautifully evokes the power of places in shaping our consciousness and perception As readers of Alex Miller, we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a great heart and a penetrating sensibility, and in the thrall of one of our nation's most beloved writers.' Tom Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of History, ANU 'Max tells of Alex Miller's search -- in turns fearful and elated -- for the elusive past of Max Blatt, a man he loves, who loved him and who taught him that he must write with love. Miller discovers that he is also searching for a defining part of himself, formed by his relation to Max Blatt, but whose significance will remain obscure until he finds Max, complete, in his history. With Max, Miller the novelist has written a wonderful work of non-fiction, as fine as the best of his novels. Always a truth-seeker, he has rendered himself vulnerable, unprotected by the liberties permitted to fiction. Max is perhaps his most moving book, a poignant expression of piety, true to his mentor's injunction to write with love.' Raimond Gaita, award-winning author of Romulus, My Father I began to see that whatever I might write about Max, discover about him, piece together with those old shards of memory, it would be his influence on the friendships of the living that would frame his story in the present. According to your 1939 Gestapo file, you adopted the cover names Landau and Maxim. The name your mother and father gave you was Moses. We knew you as Max. You had worked in secret. From an early age you concealed yourself - like the grey box beetle in the final country of your exile, maturing on its journey out of sight beneath the bark of the tree. You risked death every day. And when at last the struggle became hopeless, you escaped the hell and found a haven in China first, and then Australia, where you became one of those refugees who, in their final place of exile, chose not death but silence and obscurity. Alex Miller followed the faint trail of Max Blatt's early life for five years. Max's story unfolded, slowly at first, from the Melbourne Holocaust Centre's records then to Berlin's Federal Archives. From Berlin, Miller travelled to Max's old home town of Wroclaw in Poland. And finally in Israel with Max's niece, Liat Shoham, and her brother Yossi Blatt, at Liat's home in the moshav Shadmot Dvora in the Lower Galilee, the circle of friendship was closed and the mystery of Max's legendary silence was unmasked. Max is an astonishing and moving tribute to friendship, a meditation on memory itself, and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity.
From the award-winning author of Conditions of Faith and Journey to the Stone Country, Alex Miller's new novel reveals the inner life of an artist, torn between his obsession with his art and his love of his wife and daughter.
“This thoughtful autobiographical work by an award-winning Australian novelist” chronicles a young author’s adventuresome coming of age (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). In this epic yet intimate autobiographical novel, acclaimed Australian author Alex Miller returns to his fictional alter ego Robert Crofts, the subject of his debut work, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain. To flee his abusive father in the years after World War II, sixteen-year-old Robert leaves his childhood home in London for the Australian Outback. After a sojourn there, Robert moves to cosmopolitan Melbourne where he meets Lena Soren, the woman who becomes the true center of his life. As their intimacy deepens, Lena struggles to free herself from the familial demands and social norms that suffocate her. Very much in love, Robert follows Lena to the end of the earth and back again as their relationship nourishes both his artistic aspirations and her ever stronger sense of self. The Passage of Love is the story of a young man discovering his calling, a young woman pursuing her own destiny, and a modern country struggling to define itself through shifting mores.
From one of Australia's greatest novelists comes this fine collection, a storyteller's journey. These short stories and essays, written over the last forty years, comprise an insightful and intelligent meditation on the life of the novelist and the culture of contemporary Australia. Personal and intimate as many of these pieces are, this collection forms a kind of assured autobiography, of the sort that only Alex Miller could write. Alex Miller's stories are told with a rare level of wisdom and profundity, engaging the intellect and the emotions simultaneously. Stories are, after all, in his blood.
Strangers did not, as a rule, find their way to Chez Dom, a small Tunisian cafe in Paris. Run by the widow Houria and her young niece, Sabiha, the cafe offers a home away from home for the North African immigrant workers at the great abattoirs of Vaugirard who, as with Houria and Sabiha themselves, have grown used to the smell of blood in the air.
A hauntingly beautiful meditation on the land, the past, exile and friendship, Landscape of Farewell is the powerful new novel from acclaimed Australian author, Alex Miller. It is the story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his much-loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier. When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his country's past. Following Alex Miller's Miles Franklin-winning Journey to the Stone Country, Landscape of Farewell is a wise and grave novel of power, beauty and truth.
A Bow from My Shadow is a series of poems in dialogue. Poets Alex Miller and Luke Irwin alternate one with another forming a call and response of poetic contemplation. Irwin and Miller have achieved a fresh collaborative writing experi- ence, which, for them -- and everyone -- helps navigate each day, redressing short comings and illuminating desires. This lively collection invites the reader into the process of creating and connection, sometimes under duress and at other times with delight.
Starting with Frege's foundational theories of sense and reference, Miller provides an introduction to the formal logic used in all subsequent philosophy of language. He communicates a sense of active philosophical debate by confronting the views of the early theorists concerned with building systematic theories - Frege, Russell, and the logical positivists - with the attacks mounted by sceptics - such as Quine, Kripke, and Wittgenstein. This leads to excursions into related areas of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science that present more recent attempts to save the notions of sense and meaning by philosophers such as Grice, Searle, Fodor, McGinn, and Wright. Miller then returns to the systematic program by examining the formal theories of Donald Davidson, concluding with a chapter surveying the relevance of philosophy of language to the broader metaphysical debates between realists and anti-realists.
Think in the Clojure way! Once you're familiar with Clojure, take the next step with extended lessons on the best practices and most critical decisions you'll need to make while developing. Learn how to model your domain with data, transform it with pure functions, manage state, spread your work across cores, and structure apps with components. Discover how to use Clojure in the real world, and unlock the speed and power of this beautiful language on the Java Virtual Machine. Clojure Applied gives you the practical, realistic advice and depth of field that's been missing from your development practice. You want to develop software in the most effective, efficient way possible. This book gives you the answers you've been looking for in friendly, clear language. Dive into the core concepts of Clojure: immutable collections, concurrency, pure functions, and state management. You'll finally get the complete picture you've been looking for, rather than dozens of puzzle pieces you must assemble yourself. First, explore the core concepts of Clojure development: learn how to model your domain with immutable data; choose the ideal collection; and write simple, pure functions for efficient transformation. Next you'll apply those core concepts to build applications: discover how Clojure manages state and identity; spread your work for concurrent programming; and create and assemble components. Finally, see how to manage external integration and deployment concerns by developing a testing strategy, connecting with other data sources, and getting your libraries and applications out the door. Go beyond the toy box and into Clojure's way of thinking. By the end of this book, you'll have the tools and information to put Clojure's strengths to work. What You Need: To follow along with the examples in the book, you will need Clojure 1.6, Leinegen 2, and Java 6 or higher.
Based on the lives of real people in Somerset on the borders of Exmoor, Miller tells his own story of a young labourer swept up in the adventure of riding second horse in a west country stag hunt. Finding himself in a closed social system in which he has neither status nor power, the young man identifies with the aberrant Tivington nott stag, which, despite its lack of antlers, has become a legend in the district for its ability to elude the hunt and to compete successfully with the antlered stags. 'This meditation on the condition of wildness, on being an outsider, is one of the most original pieces of writing of the year.' - Melbourne Herald 'An extraordinarily gripping novel.' - Melbourne Times 'Altogether brilliant. This man knows his hunting country.' - Somerset County Gazette
A narrow, vertical painting, tightly enclosing the scene. Her pale arm and her pale thigh. Viewed at a diagonal through an exceedingly tall doorway. just a glimpse of something.' An ageing portrait artist meets a woman who unsettles him, yet inspires him to paint her. Reluctantly, at first, they are drawn together. The ambiguity of the relationship between painter and subject is revealed through Alex Miller's subtle, sensuous narrative. The artist must watch and wait to trap the shy beast. For the skill of portraiture is in seeing beyond the face, beyond the likeness. 'Like Patrick White, Miller uses the painter to portray the ambivalence of art and the artist. In The Sitters is the brooding genius of light. Its presence is made manifest in Miller's supple, painterly prose which layers words into textured moments.' - The Sunday Age 'An awesomely elegant, subtly sensuous, stylish exploration of the inner self of an ageing portrait artist. If there were doubts about the maturity of Australian fiction, this book puts those doubts to rest.' - Frank Moorhouse and Sue Woolfe, 1995 NSW Premier's Awards 'The description of the creative process is extraordinary.' - The Weekend Australian
Autumn Laing has long outlived the legendary circle of artists she cultivated in the 1930s. Now 'old and skeleton gaunt', she reflects on her tumultuous relationship with the abundantly talented Pat Donlon and the effect it had on her husband, on Pat's wife and the body of work which launched Pat's career. A brilliantly alive and insistently ene...
Following the sudden end of her marriage, Annabelle Beck returns from Melbourne to the sanctuary of her old family home in North Queensland. There she discovers that the former stockman, Bo Rennie, knows her from her childhood.
The new novel from Australia’s highly acclaimed literary treasure is an extraordinarily powerful exploration of tragedy, betrayal, the true nature of friendship and the beauty of lasting love “Me and Ben had been mates since we was boys and if it come to it I knew I would have to be on his side.” Bobby Blue is caught between loyalty to his only friend, Ben Tobin, and his boss, Daniel Collins, the new constable at Mount Hay. “Ben was not a big man but he was strong and quick as a snake. He had his own breed of pony that was just like him, stocky and reliable on their feet.” Bobby understands the people and the ways of Mount Hay, while Collins studies the country as an archaeologist might, bringing his coastal values to the hinterland. Bobby says, “I do not think Daniel would have understood Ben in a million years.” Increasingly bewildered and goaded to action by his wife, Constable Collins takes up his shotgun and his Webley pistol to deal with Ben. And when Bobby’s love for Collins’s willful young daughter Irie is exposed, it leads to tragic consequences for them all. Miller’s exquisite depictions of the country of the Queensland highlands form the background of this simply told but deeply significant novel of friendship, love, loyalty and the tragic consequences of misunderstanding and mistrust. Coal Creek is a wonderfully satisfying novel with a gratifying resolution. It carries all the wisdom and emotional depth we have come to expect from Miller’s richly evocative prose.
In this haunting story, two Australian men are hired to clear the ubiquitous manuka scrub in a bleak and rain-swept New Zealand gully. As their wide open homeland and dreams of teaching the locals how to break in horses begin to seem increasingly remote, the backbreaking, monotonous work and isolation soon take their toll, on body and mind.
Robert Blewitt, alias Bobby Blue, a vingt ans lorsqu’il rejoint Daniel Collins au sein de la police de Mount Hay, dans l’état du Queensland, Australie. Il fait alors la connaissance d’Esme, l’épouse de Daniel, et de leurs deux filles, Irie et Miriam. Bobby Blue semble emprunter une voie bien éloignée de celle de son enfance libre et orageuse passée dans le bush avec son ami de toujours, Ben Tobin, jeune chien fou à la réputation de mauvais garçon. Condamné par son passé, Ben Tobin devient bientôt la cible de Daniel Collins, esprit étroit et sous influence, peu enclin à ergoter sur la nature du coupable. Bobby Blue se retrouve alors pris au piège entre la loyauté qu’il doit à son supérieur, l’inébranlable amitié qui le lie à Ben Tobin... et l’ardente complicité qu’il entretient avec Irie, adolescente aventureuse qui n’aspire qu’à embrasser les chemins de la tragédie... Un pas de plus dans le bush... Un pas de plus vers Coal Creek et leur destinée à tous s’en trouvera bouleversée. Alex Miller est né en 1936 à Londres. Australien d’adoption, il fut tour à tour garçon de ferme, magasinier, carillonneur, dresseur de chevaux, universitaire, dramaturge et enseignant, avant de publier en 1988 son premier livre. Auteur de dix romans, c’est avec Landscape of Farewell (2007), Lovesong (Phébus, 2012) et surtout Autumn Laing (Phébus, 2013) qu’il acquiert définitivement le statut d’écrivain majeur de son pays. Il reçoit en 2007 le Manning Clark Cultural Award pour sa contribution au rayonnement de la littérature australienne à l’étranger.
Ward Rankin had not wanted to be tied to the station; he'd imagined a life of travel and experience but there was no-one else. When his mother died, it came to him, a frustrated man. Ida, his young wife, sees a solution to her own discontent in her growing feelings for the young English stockman Robert Crofts.
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