Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Plains (1982), Barley Patch (2009) and A Million Windows (2014).

Works By Gerald Murnane

The Still-Breathing Author
'When the last of my completed but unpublished works has been published in a few years from now, my readers will be in possession of all that I’m capable of giving them.'
5 Feb. 2018

Works Featuring Gerald Murnane

Murnane's Signposts
‘Does telling literature to get fucked mean you are articulating a new understanding of what literature is and what it can do vis-à-vis its apparent opposite, which might be something like “life”?’
27 Nov. 2022
Reader, Mark My Meaning
'The connection of figures of speech and figures of thought is not just a matter of technique, for Murnane; rather, it is meaning itself.'
22 May. 2022
In the Room with Gerald Murnane
There’s nothing superior about a critic who does not know their material, and there’s no excuse for professional readers whose memories for fiction are faulty, but I’d hoped my usual need to plaster over lapses in attention would be less laborious...
23 Apr. 2018
Gerald Murnane: An Idiot in the Greek Sense
‘The question will arise: did I live this imaginative life because I didn’t find my real life satisfactory? That’s a question that I can’t answer, that no one else can answer. You can’t answer these questions definitively. In some respects I was i...
30 Oct. 2015
Fiction as Alchemy: An extract from an interview with Gerald Murnane
I understand that there is a time in the history of the visual arts when what we call scholars or critics wrote much about the composition of a painting. Not just the subject matter alone, but the way that the painting, the details or items in the...
5 Sept. 2014
Remote Viewing: A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane
As the narrator of A Million Windows repeatedly reaffirms, the most important compositional principle in Murnane’s work is a genuine and thoroughgoing respect for the space of fiction as something radically different from everyday reality.
2 Sept. 2014
Signs for the Soul
The reading Coetzee offers of Gerald Murnane is interesting in a number of ways: it not only tells us things that Coetzee sees in Murnane, it tells us that Coetzee considers Murnane’s work to be important, and worthy of wider attention. It also te...
9 July. 2013