Postcards From Surfers

Postcards From Surfers PDF Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0857960423
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Book Description
A short shot of brilliant storytelling one of the most celebrated modern Australian short stories is now available to read by itself, wherever you are. A young woman from Melbourne visits her parents, and Auntie Lorna, in Surfers Paradise. As she stays with them, and writes postcard after postcard home, she thinks back on relationships that have shaped her. Helen Garner's collection Postcards from Surfers heralded a new generation of Australian writing, and her beautifully detailed, honest and evocative prose is on perfect display in this the title story.

Postcards From Surfers

Postcards From Surfers PDF Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0857960423
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Book Description
A short shot of brilliant storytelling one of the most celebrated modern Australian short stories is now available to read by itself, wherever you are. A young woman from Melbourne visits her parents, and Auntie Lorna, in Surfers Paradise. As she stays with them, and writes postcard after postcard home, she thinks back on relationships that have shaped her. Helen Garner's collection Postcards from Surfers heralded a new generation of Australian writing, and her beautifully detailed, honest and evocative prose is on perfect display in this the title story.

Postcards from Surfers

Postcards from Surfers PDF Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 145962114X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
These stories are about life and love; of looking back and longing; of what it means to be a stranger, on foreign ground and known, told with the piercing familiarity and resonance we have come to expect. Honest, often very funny and always woven in ways that surprise, the se stories tease out everyday life to show the darkness underneath....

Postcards from Surfers by Helen Garner

Postcards from Surfers by Helen Garner PDF Author: Pam Baker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 17

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Book Description


The Children's Bach

The Children's Bach PDF Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593470761
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Now in a new edition with a foreword by Rumaan Alam, a modern classic from one of Australia’s greatest writers • "It’s high time American readers knew her generous, category-defying imagination."—New York Times "The Children’s Bach is [Garner’s] masterpiece."—Public Books Set in suburban Melbourne in the early 1980s, The Children’s Bach centers on Dexter and Athena Fox, their two sons, and the insulated world they’ve built together. Despite the routine challenges of domestic life, they are largely happy. But when a friend from Dexter’s past resurfaces and introduces the couple to the city’s bohemian underground—unbound by routine and driven by desire—Athena begins to wonder if life might hold more for her, and the tenuous bonds that tie the Foxes together start to fray. A literary institution in Australia, Helen Garner’s perfectly formed novels embody the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s. Drawn on a small canvas and with a subtle musical backdrop, The Children’s Bach is “a jewel” (Ben Lerner) within Garner’s revered catalogue, a beloved work that solidified her place among the masters of modern letters, a finely etched masterpiece that weighs the burdens of commitment against the costs of liberation.

Monkey Grip

Monkey Grip PDF Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1925774066
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Helen Garner’s gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiece—the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex. When Nora falls in love with Javo, she is caught in the web of his addiction; and as he moves between loving her and leaving, between his need for her and promises broken, Nora’s life becomes an intense dance of loving and trying to let go. Helen Garner is one of Australia’s finest authors. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her novels include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Spare Room. I rolled and rolled in the water, deafening my ears while I thought of, and discarded, all the reasons why I shouldn’t go. I popped up, hanging on to the rail, hair streaming on my neck. ‘OK. I’ll come.’ Javo was looking at me. So, afterwards, it is possible to see the beginning of things, the point at which you had already plunged in, while at the time you thought you were only testing the water with your toe. ‘Garner is a natural storyteller.’ James Wood, New Yorker ‘Her use of language is sublime.’ Scotsman ‘This is the power of Garner’s writing. She drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this reason Garner has become part of us all.’ Australian ‘Its embattled characters are so real that by the last page you feel not just that you have read a magnificent novel but that you have experienced life itself.’ The Times on The Spare Room 'What Garner offers in these novels is an alternative to the cloying metafiction of the late 20th century and the washed-out realism of the 21st. They are undeniably of their time – the 1970s commitment to the liberating possibilities of sex, drugs and communal living in Monkey Grip, the hangover nursed in the 1980s in The Children’s Bach – but they also belong to a literary epoch we think of as long gone, as they earnestly strive to resurrect a modernist art of estrangement.' London Review of Books

Postcards from Surfers

Postcards from Surfers PDF Author: Helen Garner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Large print books
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Helen Garner's short stories tease out life's dailiness to show the darkness underneath - but also the possibilities of joy.

The First Stone

The First Stone PDF Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: Picador Australia
ISBN: 9780330355834
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Bestselling title in which the author examines the issue of sexual harassment through the true story of two women who accused the master of Ormond College, University of Melbourne, of indecent assault. The book focuses on Garner's personal response to the event and greater issues of sex and power. The author has written many acclaimed novels and short stories, including 'Monkey Grip' and 'The Last Days of Chez Nous'.

Unpolished Gem

Unpolished Gem PDF Author: Alice Pung
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440662053
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
“Poignant, provocative, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, Pung’s rollicking tale of two worlds is not to be missed.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) After Alice Pung’s family fled to Australia from the killing fields of Cambodia, her father chose Alice as her name because he thought their new country was a Wonderland. In this lyrical, bittersweet debut memoir—already an award-winning bestseller when it was published in Australia—Alice grows up straddling two worlds, East and West, her insular family and the Australia outside. With wisdom beyond her years and a keen eye for comedy in everyday life, she writes of the trials of assimilation and cultural misunderstanding, and of the tender but fraught relationships between three generations of women trying to live the Australian dream without losing themselves. Unpolished Gem is a moving, vivid journey about identity and the ultimate search for acceptance and healing, delivered by a writer possessed of rare empathy, penetrating insight, and undeniable narrative gifts.

A Writing Life

A Writing Life PDF Author: Bernadette Brennan
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1925410390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
‘This is literary critique and biography at its finest. Australian Financial Review Helen Garner is one of Australia’s most important and most admired writers. She is revered for her fearless honesty in the pursuit of her craft. But Garner also courts controversy, not least because she refuses to be constrained by the rules of literary form. She has never been afraid to write herself into her nonfiction, and many of her own experiences help to shape her fiction. But who is the ‘I’ in Helen Garner’s work? Bernadette Brennan’s A Writing Life is the first full-length study of Garner’s forty years of work, a literary portrait that maps all of her books against the different stages of her life. Brennan has had access to previously unavailable papers in Garner’s archive, and she provides a lively and rigorous reading of the books, journals and correspondence of one of Australia’s most beloved women of letters. Dr Bernadette Brennan is an academic and researcher in contemporary Australian writing, literature and ethics. She is the author of a number of publications, including a monograph on Brian Castro and two edited collections: Just Words?: Australian Authors Writing for Justice (UQP 2008), and Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics (Vagabond 2008). She lives in Sydney. Garner has always been a boundary-crosser. Refusing the constrictions of literary genre she has sought to write across and craft her own versions of them. She readily admits to a ‘me’ character in all her work. That character is a carefully constructed self. In her fiction, she unsettles her readers’ assumptions about protagonists by creating ‘Helen’ characters, most blatantly in ‘Little Helen’s Sunday Afternoon’, ‘Habe Dank’ and The Spare Room. In so doing, she demonstrates the complexity of a constructed fictional self. ‘Billed as “the first full-length study of Garner’s 40 years of work, a literary portrait that maps all of her books against the different stages of her life”. Well, who wouldn’t want to read that?’ Australian ‘Bernadette Brennan’s ingenious A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work, which gets around the subject’s resistance to biography by viewing her life through her writing, as Garner herself does.’ Susan Wyndham, Best Books of 2017, Australian Book Review ‘Brennan’s depiction of Garner’s fearless approach to the very difficult subjects of The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief is beautifully modulated and a real triumph. She has captured and interpreted an important writer and her work beautifully.’ Books + Publishing ‘Brennan has produced a literary portrait that more than does its subject justice. It is not a biography; Garner was quite clear that she didn’t want that, but because Garner is so often present in her own writing, it’s inevitable that her life is reflected in the discussion of her works. This helps put her works in context, and a picture emerges of an amazing writer...Bernadette Brennan has done us all a great favour in delivering this immensely enjoyable book.’ Mark Rubbo, Readings ‘Brennan is an astute and sensitive reader of Garner’s work.’ Big Issue ‘The writing is clear, measured, and graceful throughout...The readings of the fiction are astute and straightforward, tracing Garner’s development from the allegedly unstructured Monkey Grip, which in fact offers a formal equivalent to the push-me pull-you vagaries of love and junk, through the perfection of The Children’s Bach and the experiments in voice and style in Postcards from Surfers, to the late-style bareness and hardness of The Spare Room.’ Sydney Morning Herald 'This book offers an illuminating discussion of Garner’s boundary crossing work. Its own magic lies in bringing elements of memoir and criticism into an absorbing conversation that begins with a rich contextualisation of Garner’s work, and extends into the literary and ethical questions with which Brennan has long been concerned.’Australian ‘Absorbing, informative and engaging read.’ Conversation ‘Brennan examines both assumptions by tracing Garner’s steps to becoming a full-time writer in a style that is both thoughtful and readable.’ Australian Book Review ‘Bernadette Brennan brings a calm eye and an easy grace to her descriptions of Garner’s life, literature and impact on Australia’s cultural and socio-political landscape...She draws a more complex picture of one of our best known and most skilled writers than we’ve enjoyed in a full-length volume before.’ A Bigger Brighter World ‘Probably my favourite book so far [this year]. A marvellous tribute to one of Australia’s great writers.’ Mark Rubbo, The Best Books We’ve Read This Year (So Far) 2017, Readings ‘Bernadette Brennan’s first full-length study of Helen Garner’s work, A Writing Life, has inspired me to pile Garner’s books on my bedside table, and to look at each of them again with fresh eyes.’ The Best Books We’ve Read This Year (So Far) 2017, Readings ‘A remarkably shrewd study of Garner’s work knitted with a tender representation of her personal life.’ Mascara Literary Review ‘Brennan performs a kind of call for literature, its criticism as well as creation.’ Sydney Review of Books ‘You might also include academic Bernadette Brennan’s superb literary portrait of Garner, A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work, which combines a close analysis of Garner’s work with illuminating insights into her life. Garner gave Brennan unprecedented access to her archives and spent long hours in conversation with her. It shows.’ Sydney Morning Herald, Can’t-Put-Down Titles for Summer ‘A book for those who want to understand Garner’s work more. But, it is also a book which makes clear the significant contribution Garner has made to Australian literature. And, in doing that, it is itself a significant book.’ Whispering Gums

True Stories

True Stories PDF Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1921351845
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Helen Garner visits the morgue, and goes cruising on a Russian ship. She sees women giving birth, and gets the sack for teaching her students about sex. She attends a school dance and a gun show. She writes about dreaming, about turning fifty, and the storm caused by The First Stone. Her story on the murder of the two-year-old Daniel Valerio wins her a Walkley Award. Garner looks at the world with a shrewd and sympathetic eye. Her non-fiction, with its many voices, is always passionate and compelling. True Stories is an extraordinary book, spanning twenty-five years of work, by one of Australia’s great writers.