Gerald Murnane

This story could well be the only chance you get to take note of Gerald Murnane, said in The New York Times. “A strong case could be made for Murnane as the greatest living Englishlanguage writer most people have never heard of,” and unless the 79-yearold wins a Nobel Prize— as some oddsmakers expect he will—he may well remain a cult figure. For the past decade, he has lived in tiny Goroke, Australia, and though he enjoys tending bar at the local golf club, he strongly prefers not to travel. “I have a reputation in some quarters as an aloof recluse,” he says. “But that’s only because I refuse to go to writers’ festivals and talk the fake-intellectual [expletive] that most writers talk.” Fortyfour years after Murnane published his first novel, however, readers are gradually finding him. “It seems,” he says, “like things are starting to work out.”

The two Murnane books arriving in the U.S. this month are typical in being both autobiographical and highly introspective, said in The Washington Post. Border Districts, a novel, is narrated by a man in his 60s who has never traveled more than a day’s journey from his birthplace yet has moved to a remote town with the intent of dismantling received ideas and finding everything he needs in his own imagination. Murnane’s other new book, Stream System, bears a cover blurb that labels the author a genius and “a worthy heir to Beckett”—yet its stories, too, rarely leave the brain space of their creator. “People are a mystery to me,” Murnane says. “I don’t know what anyone is thinking.”