'This handsome hardback edition of Helen Garner’s collected short fiction celebrates the seventy-fifth birthday of one of Australia’s most loved authors. These stories—that delve into the complexities of love and longing, of the pain, darkness and joy of life—are all told with her characteristic sharpness of observation, honesty and humour. Each one a perfect piece, together they showcase Garner’s mastery of the form.' (Publication summary)
'Helen Garner needs no introduction. Likewise her stories in this collection emerge on the page without guide, without preface, with no prologue, no opening referential epigraph. Garner's table of contents, like a menu of courses, displays fourteen curated tales. Each story—depicting separate sets of lives, people, ranging literary points of view, and diverse dialects—may stand alone, and yet the collection's sequence makes a perfect complement. While no overt analysis need be made of the presented order, its unfolding progression satisfies by occasional return to familiar inflection, texture, flavor, pang.' (Introduction)
'In her 1996 essay 'The Art of the Dumb Question', Helen Garner recalls bragging to friend Tim Winton that she had written a 200-word 'syntactically perfect sentence'. 'He scorched me with a surfer’s stare,' she writes, 'and said, ‘I couldn’t care less about that sort of shit’.' It’s an illuminating anecdote about the different approaches taken by two of our great writers.' (Introduction)
'Helen Garner needs no introduction. Likewise her stories in this collection emerge on the page without guide, without preface, with no prologue, no opening referential epigraph. Garner's table of contents, like a menu of courses, displays fourteen curated tales. Each story—depicting separate sets of lives, people, ranging literary points of view, and diverse dialects—may stand alone, and yet the collection's sequence makes a perfect complement. While no overt analysis need be made of the presented order, its unfolding progression satisfies by occasional return to familiar inflection, texture, flavor, pang.' (Introduction)
'In her 1996 essay 'The Art of the Dumb Question', Helen Garner recalls bragging to friend Tim Winton that she had written a 200-word 'syntactically perfect sentence'. 'He scorched me with a surfer’s stare,' she writes, 'and said, ‘I couldn’t care less about that sort of shit’.' It’s an illuminating anecdote about the different approaches taken by two of our great writers.' (Introduction)
