The End of the World (15 page)

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Arts Victoria for a grant giving me time and space to edit these stories, and to the Vermont Studio Center, USA, for a residency where I rediscovered the value of solitude.

My thanks also to Jane Watson, Janet Hutchinson and Jan O’Reilly for their belief and support, and to the friends who read my story drafts–your own writing was as inspiring as your comments.

And to Anna Crago and Rob Cullinan at UQP, thank you for appreciating the short story form and helping to make these stories better.

Many of these stories were first published in a different form in literary magazines. Publishers and editors of literary magazines, big and small, are the champions of new Australian writing. They have my admiration and respect.

‘Inheritance’ was published in Westerly; ‘Save Our School’ (as ‘Like the World’s an Armchair’) in Sleepers’ Almanac 2006 (Sleepers Publishing) and Best Australian Stories 2006 (Black Inc); ‘My Mother-in-law in the Family Tree’ (winner Glen Eira My Brother Jack National Short Story Competition) in Meanjin and Behind the Front Fence (Five Mile Press); ‘The End of the World’ (as ‘The Roadtrain of Love’) in Ulitarra and On the Edge (Five Mile Press); ‘Armadillo’ (winner Society of Women Writers NSW National Short Story Award) in Southerly; ‘FutureGirl®’ (winner Greater Dandenong Short Story Competition) in Del Sol Review (USA); ‘The Rules of Fishing’ in Picador New Writing 3 (Pan Macmillan); ‘Snapshots of Strangers’ (winner The Age Short Story Competition) in The Age and Secret Lives (Five Mile Press); ‘The Wrestlers’ (as ‘Second Skin’) in Imago; ‘Women’s Trouble’ in Meanjin; ‘Inches Apart’ in Southerly; ‘Glass Heart’ in Redoubt; ‘Fluid’ in Canberra University Monitor; ‘Distance Runner’ (winner, Judah Waten National Short Story Competition) in Space: New Writing (Whitmore Press) and Best Australian Stories 2004 (Black Inc).

Other short-story collections from UQP

COLLECTED STORIES

Olga Masters

In the brief four years between the publication of her first volume of short stories and her death in 1986, Olga Masters was celebrated as one of Australia’s most powerful and original writers. She won a National Book Council award and was shortlisted for another, and was published in the United States, France and Italy. She wrote two novels and three collections of short stories, the third published posthumously.

Gathered now in one volume are all the stories from The Home Girls and A Long Time Dying and those she had completed for The Rose Fancier; tough, honest stories that portray rural and suburban life with compassion and unsparing observation.

‘Masters can be both tender and funny, and always there is absolute authenticity of detail, a strong sense of time and place, an effortless depiction of personality.’

Judges’ Report, NBC Awards

‘She had a wonderful, unsentimental eye for the little ironies, tensions and even cruelties of household, and a beautifully spare, concise way of expressing them.’

Sun Herald

‘One of the best writers of fiction in Australia.’

The Bulletin

ISBN 978 0 7022 2883 4

COLLECTED STORIES

Thea Astley

Thea Astley’s stories capture the lushness and cruelty of the Queensland landscape with its rich wet smells and weird cast of characters. She exposes pretension and exploitation with an acid wit and comic flair, and has won worldwide acclaim for her writing. This selection of stories spans more than thirty years and includes many not previously collected, along with well-known pieces from Hunting the Wild Pineapple and It’s Raining in Mango, which won the inaugural Steele Rudd Award for the best short-story collection.

‘Luxuriant, prolific of implications, shifting abruptly from benign or whimsical to malignant, a prose to match the gorgeously treacherous background against which the tales are set.’

World Literature Today

‘The verdant landscape of Queensland and Astley’s own quirky vision link and inform the diverse stories in Hunting the Wild Pineapple...Flannery O’Connor would have liked them, with their skewed language, oddball characters and deadly humour.’

The New York Times Book Review

‘The writing is intensely vivid...It’s the level of invention, of sheer story-telling, that’s thrilling...There’s a savage wit here; an amused, acerbic cynicism, but also an engaged humanity.’

Sydney Morning Herald

ISBN 978 0 7022 2951 0

COLLECTED STORIES

Janette Turner Hospital

This collection brings together in one distinguished volume a range of stories written over twenty-five years by this internationally acclaimed author.

Janette Turner Hospital’s sensuous prose reveals the inner lives of a fascinating gallery of characters caught between cultures. Some cross borders of class, gender and race, dislocated in unfamiliar and unpredictable physical worlds; others cross borders between the past and the present, blurring memory and perception in moments of crisis and illumination.

‘Janette Turner Hospital goes from strength to literary strength – ever brilliant in ideas, graceful in expression, resourceful in story.’

Fay Weldon

‘The best of her stories are like brief cyclones wrapped around an unexpected centre of calm.’

Los Angeles Times Book Review

‘One of the most elegant prose styles in the business.’

The Times

‘Sensuous, speculative fictions about the experience of dislocation
...stories develop like poems or meditations.’

New York Times Book Review

ISBN 978 0 7022 3240 4

VINCENZO’S GARDEN

John Clanchy

Winner of the Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award for
Short Stories

From the celebrated Australian short-story writer and novelist John Clanchy comes a brilliant collection of prize-winning short stories. The diverse and captivating tales are testimony to Clanchy’s mastery of voices and talent for story telling.

His characters are often at a crossroads in their lives. A husband in the midst of a terrifying, yet occasionally comic, wrestle for his sanity fights a losing battle to save his marriage. A girl steps out of her own portrait to recount the death of the famous artist who painted her. A doctor, driving late on a country road, runs down a woman and is forced to devise his own punishment. And, in the title story, a fragile woman and her beautiful daughter struggle to find love and understanding after decades of conflict.

With reversals and surprises around every corner, these stories are often humorous, frequently challenging, and always entertaining.

‘Its seven stories are all written in the laconic, reticent style that Clanchy has made his own...they are accomplished stories by a skilful and experienced writer.’

Sydney Morning Herald

‘One of those rare, outstanding pieces of writing that will stay with me for many years to come.’

Good Reading

ISBN 978 0 7022 3515 3