Stream System

Stories from a mind-bending Australian master, "a genius on the level of Beckett" (Teju Cole)

Never before available to readers in this hemisphere, these stories-originally published from 1985 to 2012-offer an irresistible compendium of the work of one of contemporary fiction's greatest magicians.

While the Australian master Gerald Murnane's reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Brutal, comic, obscene, and crystalline, Stream System runs from the haunting "Land Deal," which imagines the colonization of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams; to "Finger Web," which tells a quietly terrifying, fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny; to "The Interior of Gaaldine," which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself.

No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how-and why-we read.

When the Mice Failed to Arrive
Stream System
Land Deal
The Only Adam
Stone Quarry
Precious Bane
Cotters Come No More
There Were Some Countries
Finger Web
First Love
Velvet Waters
The White Cattle of Uppington
In Far Fields
Pink Lining
Boy Blue
Emerald Blue
The Interior of Gaaldine
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
As It Were a Letter
The Boy's Name Was David
Last Letter to a Niece
Acknowledgements