MURNANE, Gerald
Landscape with Landscape

For twenty-three years I was able to say that the most important event in my life had taken place on a frosty evening while I stood and shivered on a basketball court behind a Catholic church in an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne.

Now published for the first time outside of Australia, Landscape with Landscape was Gerald Murnane’s fourth book, and his first collection of short fiction. It offers a wide-ranging exploration of the different landscapes which make up the imagination of this extraordinary Australian writer. Five of the six loosely connected stories also trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. The sixth story, “The Battle of Acosta Nu,” is remarkable for its depth of emotion, as it imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes.

[publishers’ note]

Published by And Other Stories, 2026
Literature