'This short coda is an apologia disguised as a question. It asks: what’s not in Peter Carey—the name? Descriptors like the national, the global, the celebrity author, all fail to capture the full story: of giving up lucrative careers for writing, of small cruelties along the way, commercially catastrophic novels, the anxieties of dealing with publishers that simply will not take Australian literature seriously—of a whole box of rejection letters in the archive. Somewhere in the recesses of Carey’s fiction lie the story of these sacrifices, compromises, and expectations that slip through the narrative of globalising authorship.' (Publication abstract)