From the pen of Peter Goldsworthy - a modern champion of the lost art of storytelling - comes Honk If You Are Jesus, a bestselling novel that resists categorisation, and explodes expectations. Keep your hand on the horn during this startling comic fiction.
J.J. is back living at home in Adelaide, unemployed and drifting after a messy divorce. Then he is offered a job teaching Sign to Eliza. His new pupil is smart, sensitive, attractive - and a gorilla recently liberated from a medical research laboratory by animal rights activists. First published in 1995, the third novel by the acclaimed writer Peter Goldsworthy is unique in Australian literature: a dazzling, moving story about scientific experimentation and ethics, language and love. This edition comes with a new introduction by James Bradley. Peter Goldsworthy has won the FAW Christina Stead Prize for fiction, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Helpmann Award, shared with the composer Richard Mills, for the opera Batavia. His poetry and novels have been widely translated; four of his novels and the short story 'The Kiss' have been adapted for the stage. His most recent book is the short-story collection Gravel, shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal for Literature. This year Penguin is publishing His Stupid Boyhood, a comic memoir, and Maestro, his debut novel, is being reissued as an Angus & Robertson Australian Classic. '[Goldsworthy's] greatest achievement...Brave, brilliant, as intellectually challenging as it is playful, it is testament to a restless and unpredictable imagination.' James Bradley 'Stylish, imaginative, poignant, and hugely unsettling.' Australian 'A deeply satisfying book...represents a new achievement in his fiction...Read it. You won't find another novel like it.' Adelaide Review
Eight brilliant stories by a master of the form, author of the classic 'Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam' and 'The Kiss' A contented woman finds herself considering a bizarre sexual invitation that just days before filled her with scorn. A mediocre man is pulled into a strange dance with his stalker. A father gives his daughter a Christmas present with a disturbing history. An ugly sports parent plays a game of ridiculous chance. A young boy's music lesson offers him a discordant insight into adult behaviour. And in a primal tale about the borderline between animals and humans, death is horrifyingly not the end of the story . . . Compulsively readable, pitch-perfect in mood, Gravel ponders the forces that can wear down a marriage, darken desire, lead people to thwart their best intentions. PRAISE FOR GOLDSWORTHY'S SHORT FICTION 'Stories of magnificent achievement and disturbing power' Gail Jones, Australian Book Review 'A subtle hook draws the reader in . . . Once the lure is taken, you're drawn effortlessly to the end' Barry Oakley, Weekend Australian 'Goldsworthy's brilliance is peculiarly Australian. His is a literature of the Australian mundane' Ben Eltham, Courier-Mail
Few Australian writers have delved as deeply as Peter Goldsworthy into the mysterious state of being that is childhood. In this memoir he applies his fascination with that state to his own boyhood, from his bizarre first memories to the embarrassments of adolescence. For all his working life Goldsworthy has been both doctor and writer - Australia's Chekhov - and here he reveals a mind charmed equally by science and literature, by the rational and the imagined. The country towns he grew up in gave free rein to the young Peter's intense curiosity, and in the fifties and sixties he ran amok in hilarious fashion. A boy with a mind wide open to the universe but closed to self-knowledge, he came of age with a naive self-confidence that was ripe for the bursting. Comically self-deprecating, unrestrained in its honesty, His Stupid Boyhood is a passport to the lost country of youth, and a beautiful homage to childhood in general. 'Australia's most wide-ranging writer shows us where it all comes from: out of that single, concentrated, burningly self-conscious point of being an unusually alert infant.' Clive James 'Goldsworthy writes with a graceful irony of the terror, boredom, longing, shame and leation of boyhood. We can only hope that this is the first volume of his story.' Susanna Moore 'A hilarious account of coming-of-age adventures, it goes some way to providing clues as to why his life led him down a path of medicine and writing.' Sun-Herald 'Goldsworthy's self-deprecating candour adds a light touch to his existential searching.' Saturday Age 'An intelligent, humorous and at times emotional insight into the boyhood forces that shaped the man.' Men's Style '[Goldsworthy] tells his story with wit and mordent self-deprecation.' Newcastle Herald
Physical and mental, sexual and literary, constructive and destructive. Coming of age in a small town peopled with big characters, he finds his new teacher Miss Peach the most unforgettable of all – his memories of her will haunt him for the rest of his life. Everything I Knew is at once laugh-out-loud funny and cry-out-loud tragic – farcical, horrifying, confronting – and bursting with originality. It challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence, and yet again shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone. There is no novel quite like it in Australian literature. 'Few of his Australian contemporaries are so skilled at the narrative arts as Goldworthy, let alone so fearless in seeking new, rather than familiar, fictional ground to work.' Peter Pierce, Sydney Morning Herald 'Intelligent, complex and deeply affecting.' Murray Bramwell, Adelaide Review 'A bawdy, honest, funny, tragic book about the aspirations of the young and how life happens to them. One of the best novels this year. Simply brilliant.' Ian Nichols, West Australian
‘My first stray thought: cancer is a gift. I’m lucky to have it. What priceless material for a doctor-writer.’ What lessons might cancer teach him before it finishes him off? Peter Goldsworthy asks, obliquely. A GP of forty years’ practice, as well as one of Australia’s most awarded and celebrated writers, Goldsworthy (‘Doctor Pete’ to his patients) brings his characteristic black humour and storytelling power to the tale of his own cancer journey. Accidentally diagnosed after a scan of his dicky knee, he was thrown into a world that he knew only too well from the other side: a world that soon shrank to hospital visits, sleepless and hyped-up nights on dexamethasone and life-saving chemotherapy. Never one to waste a story, Peter intersperses his own experience with odd and astonishing case stories of patients and literary friends who have trodden the same path: both cautionary tales and exemplary tales, sometimes laugh-out-loud, sometimes deeply moving, that intersect with, or refract, his own travels through denial, acceptance, treatment and survival. Darkly funny, and filled with growing love and wonder, The Cancer Finishing School offers lessons in how to live life in the shadow of an incurable illness.
Peter Goldsworthy is described as Australia's best short-story writer – this collection of his work, from a period of more than 20 years, shows why. These stories are by turns funny, dark, sad and always addictively readable. A dazzling new story is included. From the acclaimed author of the superb Three Dog Night.
Collaboratively constructed novel which makes mock of contemporary literary theories. Matthews is the author of the well-regarded TLouisa', a biography of the Henry Lawson's mother. Goldsworthy is the author of TMaestro', and is also a poet.
Drunk, restless and excited, Kenny and Tom decide to continue their night with a swim in the local water tank. At first exuberant and elated, the teenagers' adventure takes a terrifying turn when they realise they are trapped in the tank with no way out. Dark and gripping, Peter Goldsworthy's The Kiss is a classic Australian short story from one of our masters of the form.
Detective Sergeant Rick Zadow is angry, unmotivated, unwashed, unkempt, and almost entirely reliant on his guide dog, Scout, and voice-controlled personal assistant Siri to make it through each day: one a voice without a body, the other a body without a voice. Left blind after a bullet wound to the head two years before, he is caught up in a workers' compensation battle between two psychiatrists - one acting for him, and one appointed by WorkCover - over how much compo he should be awarded. Reminders of his former life keep on tripping Rick up. His wife has moved out, and another former passion of his life - a legendary Ducati motorbike he was halfway through restoring - sits abandoned in the back shed. All of which is the background to the central story: the breakout from jail of the man who shot him, and who is seeking to finish the job ... Part laugh-out-loud comedy, part deadly serious study of revenge, part love story, this unique novel from one of our finest writers is also a slow, crabwise journey of self-discovery. As Rick navigates his sense-world (smell, sound, touch, taste ... and finally, sight), there is a sixth sense he must also learn to trust - his gut instinct - which might just turn out to be his best.
Written in an evocative, haunting style, this moving tale of loss and the relationship between parents and child was first published in the collection Little Deaths in 1993. tailor-made for reading groups, it is a unique publication which includes an introduction by an acclaimed Australian author, an interview with Goldsworthy and room for note-taking.
A poet at once serious and humorous, elegant and down to earth, Peter Goldsworthy offers rich rewards on every page of this selection, drawn from all of his books to date and including songs from his two acclaimed opera libretti, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and The Batavia.
Ranging from the early comic sketches to the disturbing brilliance of his recent stories, this outstanding collection reinforces Peter Goldsworthy's reputation as a modern master of short fiction. Simultaneously light and dark, unsettling and amusing, his stories leave indelible traces in the memory. A writer's writer, he is also never less than compellingly readable.
A treasure trove of the finest Australian writing In this collection, acclaimed writer Mandy Sayer brings together nine of the best Australian examples of the long story - tales that combine the intensity of the short story with the complexity of a novel. In these stories, characters grow up, hook up and break up, endure calamitous loss and discover delectable love, travel to faraway places and find themselves right back where they started. From the exotic to the familiar, the sensuous to the dangerous, these soaring flights of the imagination boldly traverse the vast terrain of human experience. Showcasing the talents of some of our most loved and awarded authors, this invigorating collection is an excellent introduction to an often overlooked art form, promising to enchant all lovers of Australian fiction. 'Serves as a reminder of the calibre of Australia's best writers.' The Age 'An impressive collection of stories by anybody's measure.' Weekend Australian
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