'A master of melancholic wit, Laurie Clancy was one of Australia's most versatile short story writers. If realism was his artistic staple, he had a genius for farce and the mock-heroic, and was remarkably adept at magic realism, postmodern experimentation and the fiction of ideas. Equally at home in the pub, the seminar room, literary journals and the columns of daily newspapers, Clancy was a wickedly astute but compassionate and ultimately good-humoured guide to the vagaries of the human heart, both at home and abroad. This posthumous selection shows him in his pomp as a practitioner of fiction's shorter forms.' (Publication summary)
