The Oxford Book Of Australian Short Stories

First published in hardback in 1994, this collection of 49 stories ranges across over 120 years of Australian fiction. Includes well-known writers such as Patrick White and Christina Stead, and also less familiar authors. Aboriginal, non Anglo-Saxon, and women writers are well represented. Includes an author index, notes on contributors and an introduction by the editor, who is Professor in English and in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney.

49 stories ranging over 120 years. Stories reflect life in Australia from the early days of hardship to the recognition of a multicultural society and the new agendas for women's, gay and lesbian, and Aboriginal writing.

V. S. Pritchett, one of our greatest short story writers, has chosen forty-one stories from nine countries written in the English language for this volume, producing a collection that successfully displays the wealth and variety of an art that spans some 200 years. The United States, Great Britain, and Ireland have fine traditions of short story writing that have developed from the time of Sir Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the twentieth century the art was perfected by Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, John Updike, and V. S. Pritchett himself. Other contributions in the book come from such masters as James Joyce, Mark Twain, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Frank O'Connor, H. E. Bates, William Trevor, and Liam O'Flaherty. Now, the collection of short story masters extends to Canadian, Indian, New Zealander, and Australian writers, who show in the works included here the full range of invention and ability in a genre that continues to flourish.

Three phantoms wander the desert; a ghostly lover claims his bride at an outback station; a dead man appears beside a blood-red waterhole; a jackaroo witnesses a ghostly struggle; a frightful monster haunts the Nullarbor Plain. This anthology of Australian ghost stories - from the 1850s to the present - draws together a neglected but striking genre of fiction that works to remind those who recently settled this country how unsettled it actually is. New arrivals stumble across empty houses with ghostly occupants; lonely bushmen fantasise about ghostly women; Aborigines tell of bunyips, bugeens and 'living ghosts'; the bush is full of beckoning spectral images; and Death himself is seen prowling the streets. In these stories Australia becomes the 'down-underworld', a place where the departed will inevitably be resurrected in time, and where the dead continue to make their presence felt.

In this first extended study of Australian short fiction, Bruce Bennett adopts Christina Stead's metaphor of an ocean of story to suggest the universality of story-telling and the marks it leaves for posterity. Bennett's study stresses the range and depth of the short prose narrative in Australia.