AUSTRALIA AUTHOR · FICTION · SOCIAL LIFE AND CUSTOMS
Peter Carey
Also known as: Peter Philip Carey, Peter Stafford Carey
Peter Philip Carey (born 7 May 1943) is an Australian novelist. Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988, for Oscar and Lucinda, and won his second Booker Prize in 2001, for True History of the Kelly Gang. He has also won the Miles Franklin Award three times. In addition to writing fiction, he collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders and was, for nineteen years, executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.
SOMETHING IS ALWAYS SAYING TO ME: Be plain.
— from Collected stories
Most acclaimed
Collected stories
This indispensable volume contains the best of Frank O’Connor's short fiction. From “Guests of the Nation” to “The Mad Lomasneys” to “First Confession” to “My Oedipus Complex,” these tales of Ireland have touched generations of readers the world over and placed O'Connor alongside W. B. Yeats and James Joyce as the greatest of Irish authors. Analyzing a Robert Browning poem, O'Connor once wrote: “Since a whole lifetime must be crowded into a few minutes, those minutes must be carefully chosen indeed and lit by an unearthly glow.” Each of the sixty-seven stories gathered here achieves the same incredible feat of the imagination, laying bare entire lives and histories within the space of a few pages. Dublin schoolteacher Ned Keating waves good-bye to a charming girl and to any thoughts of returning to his village home in the lyrical and melancholy “Uprooted.” A boy on an important mission is waylaid by a green-eyed temptress and seeks forgiveness in his mother’s loving arms in “The Man of the House,” a tale that draws on O'Connor’s own difficult childhood. A series of awkward encounters and humorous misunderstandings perfectly encapsulates the complicated legacy of Irish immigration in “Ghosts,” the bittersweet account of an American family’s pilgrimage to the land of their forefathers. As a writer, critic, and teacher, O'Connor elevated the short story to astonishing new heights. This career-spanning anthology, epic in scope yet brimming with the small moments and intimate details that earned him a reputation as Ireland’s Chekhov, is a testament to Frank O’Connor's magnificent storytelling and a true pleasure to read from first page to last.
Big Bazoohley
When his family runs low on funds while on a trip to Toronto, nine-year-old Sam allows himself to be "borrowed" and entered in a contest to find the Perfecto Kiddo, hoping to win $10,000.
My life as a fake
2003
"In Melbourne in the late 1940s, a young conservative Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the most avant-garde of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working-class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of Chubb's imagination. Not only does the magazine fall for the hoax, but the local authorities also sue its editor for publishing obscenity. At the trial someone uncannily resembling the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle, leaps to his feet. At this moment a horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being he has himself manufactured." "Using as a springboard a real literary hoax that transfixed Australia in his boyhood, Peter Carey explores how the phantom poet taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker, pursuing Chubb from Melbourne to a seedy, sweaty, bitter ending in the tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur."--BOOK JACKET.