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Their Brilliant Careers

The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers

Ryan O'Neill

$27.99

Paperback

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English
Black Inc
01 August 2016
SHORTLISTED FOR MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2017

A hilarious novel in which O’Neill has imagined biographies of Australian writers – literary authors, poets, hacks, editors and academics – whose bizarre and exaggerated lives he neatly slots into real literary history. But more than satire, it is a beautifully crafted, carefully plotted, maze of a novel.

Meet Rachel Deverall, who discovered the secret source of the great literature of our time... and paid a terrible price for her discovery.

Meet Rand Washington, the hugely popular sci-fi author (of Whiteman of Cor)... and inveterate racist. 

Meet Addison Tiller, master of the bush yarn, the Chekhov of Coolabah... who never travelled outside Sydney.

Their Brilliant Careers is a playful set of stories, linked in many ways, which together form a memorable whole. A wonderful comic tapestry of the writing life, this unpredictable and intriguing work takes Australian writing in a whole new direction.

By:  
Imprint:   Black Inc
Country of Publication:   Australia
Dimensions:   Height: 210mm,  Width: 136mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   305g
ISBN:   9781863958639
ISBN 10:   1863958630
Pages:   240
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Reviews for Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers

'You have to admire O'Neill's delicious bravura. He's been one of the few short fiction writers of recent years willing to play around with the form's possibilities ... Apart from the fact there are more funny lines in O'Neill's 288 pages than there are likely to be in the entirety of Australian literature elsewhere this year, the profiles are woven smartly together, as the characters' fates and careers intertwine.' --Saturday Paper 'Ryan O'Neill combines conventions of biography and short story in an exhaustively brazen blend of Australian literary history and plausible yet gloriously bonkers invention.' --Elke Power, Readings Monthly'Their Brilliant Careers ... brims with crackerjack wit. Pressure is subtly built; punchlines are explosive.' --Australian Book Review'Ryan O'Neill has embarked on the task of creating a satirical, funny alternative history to Australian literature, an exercise he has achieved admirably and with brilliance.' --Writers Bloc'[Ryan O'Neill] offers a book that is a piss-take, a celebration, a revisionist history and, perhaps most impressively, exceedingly good fun.' --Dominic Amerena, the Australian'O'Neill has arranged a beautiful board of slain waxwings, no less funny or moving for being, in the final estimate of things, no more than shadows of the never living and the forever dead.' --Adam Rivett, Sydney Morning Herald


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