Australia's much-loved author David Malouf presents a dazzling and illuminating personal essay on the power of imagination-and its effects on the life of a writer-in this first instalment of a collectible new series. Beautifully packaged as a pocket-sized keepsake, this treasurable approach salvages a popular writer's inner philosophy from the disposability of journals and magazine columns for the sake of his fans and lovers of esoteric literature the world over.
By Australia’s greatest contemporary author, an elegant, succinct meditation on what makes for a happy life. ;-) “Happiness surely is among the simplest of human emotions and the most spontaneous,” says David Malouf. But what exactly are we looking for when we chase happiness? At this particular moment in history, privileged, industrialized nations have lessened much of what makes us unhappy: widespread poverty, illness, famine. Yet we are still unfulfilled, turning increasingly to yoga, church, Match.com, drugs, clinical therapy and retail therapy. What is at the root of our collective stress, and how can we find our way to contentment? Drawing on mythology, philosophy, art and literature, Malouf traces our conception of happiness throughout history, distilling centuries of thought into a lucid narrative. He discusses the creation myths of ancient Greece and the philosophical schools of Athens, analyzes Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary declaration that “the pursuit of happiness” is a right, explores the celebration of sensual delight in Rembrandt and Rubens and offers a perceptive take on a modern society growing larger and more impersonal. With wisdom and insight, Malouf investigates that simplest, most spontaneous of feelings and urges us to do the same.
This is a collection spanning David Malouf's career. It includes previously published poems, as well as new poems organised by their geographical setting, according to the places in which David has lived over the last 30 years."--Provided by publisher.
In his first novel in more than a decade, award-winning author David Malouf reimagines the pivotal narrative of Homer’s Iliad—one of the most famous passages in all of literature. This is the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and woeful Priam, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. A moving tale of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom is incandescent in its delicate and powerful lyricism and its unstated imperative that we imagine our lives in the glow of fellow feeling.
This brilliant collection of poems begins with a memory of new love and ends in the intimate territory of the long-familiar, where there is no need for words. It steps lightly among the object of our lives and the wonder of everyday replenishments.
The story spans Frank Harland's life from before th First World War, through years as a swaggie in the Great Depression and Brisbane in the forties, to his retirement to a patch of Australian scrub where he at least takes possession of his dream, to recapture his family's past.
Despite Johnno's assertion that Brisbane was absolutely the ugliest place in the world, I had the feeling as I walked across deserted intersections, past empty parks with their tropical trees all spiked and sharp-edged in the early sunlight, that it might even be beautiful . . . 'Johnno is a typical Australian who refuses to be typical. His disorderly presence can disturb the staleness of his home town or destroy the tranquillity of a Greek landscape.
Winner of the IMPAC Award and Booker Prize nominee In this rich and compelling novel, written in language of astonishing poise and resonance, one of Australia's greatest living writers gives an immensely powerful vision of human differences and eternal divisions. In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old British cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later he moves back into the world of Europeans, among hopeful yet terrified settlers who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place. To them, Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge: he is a force that at once fascinates and repels. His own identity in this new world is as unsettling to him as the knowledge he brings to others of the savage, the aboriginal. "Breathtaking...To read this remarkable book is to remember Babylon well, whether you think you've been there or not." --The New York Times Book Review
A collection of personal essays and writing from David Malouf to celebrate his 80th birthday. Topography, geography, history. Multiculturalism, referendums, the constitution and national occasions. Parental and grandparental romances, the sensual and bountiful beauty of Brisbane, the mysterious offerings of Queenslander houses, and leaving home. The idea of a nation and the heart of its people. Being Australian and Australia's relationship to the world. Putting ourselves on the map. All these subjects, and more, are explored from the generous, questioning and original perspective of David Malouf. At the heart of these pieces is the idea of home, where and what it is. What they illustrate is the formation of a man, an Australian and one of the best writers this country has produced.
In a sunlit piazza on an April morning, women throw buckets of water over the cobbles and men deliver trays of pastry to trattorie. In a barren room above, a fanatic watches, engaged in the details of his life's most important project: the assassination of one of Italy's most beloved men of letters. In this penetrating novella, David Malouf, the highly acclaimed Australian author and finalist for the Booker Prize, plumbs the darker uses of our passions. Weaving a dense tapestry of sensual observation and personal events of mythic importance, he re-creates the frighteningly fascinating mind of a madman poised at his moment of truth. Dazzling in its beauty, intensely enigmatic, Child's Play conjures the mystical rising and falling of fear and pathos, where human idiosyncrasy and the incantatory rhythms of life give way to mania.
ANTIPODES - stories which pinpoint the contrast between the old world and the new, between youth and age, love and hatred and even life and death itself. . . David Malouf is one of Australia's most highly acclaimed and popular poets and novelists. Now, with his first stunning collection of stories, which has won both the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Vance Palmer Award for Fiction, he establishes himself as one of the most accomplished and provocative short-story writers of our time.
Malouf's fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature David Malouf shines new light on Homer's Iliad, adding twists and reflections, as well as flashes of earthy humour, to surprise and enchant. In this exquisite gem of a novel, Achilles is maddened by grief at the death of his friend Patroclus. From the walls of Troy, King Priam watches the body of his son, Hector, being dragged behind Achilles' chariot. There must be a way, he thinks, of reclaiming the body - of pitting compromise against heroics, new ways against the old, and of forcing the hand of fate. Dressed simply and in a cart pulled by a mule, an old man sets off for the Greek camp ... Lyrical, immediate and heartbreaking Malouf's fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature - themes of war and heroics, hubris and humanity, chance and fate, the bonds between soldiers, fathers and sons, all newly burnished and brilliantly recast for our times.
Words, music, art and performance. The stuff of a satisfying life. After exploring the idea of home, where and what it is in A First Place, what does it mean to be a writer and where writing begins in The Writing Life, David Malouf moves on to words and music and art and performance in Being There. With pieces on the Sydney Opera House - then and now - responses to art, artists and architects, and including Malouf's not previously published libretti for Voss and a translation of Hippolytus, this is an unmissable and stimulating collection of one man's connection to the world of art, ideas and culture.
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