What To Read

Gerald Murnane, whose name you probably recognize for being perennially touted as a Nobel Prize contender, is often described as the greatest living English writer that most people have never heard of. Murnane's work defies categorization. The label of “metafiction” is most often used to describe his introspective and intricately self-referential work, which challenges traditional narrative structures. Author Brian Evenson cleverly described his first experience of reading Murnane as if “Kafka had drained a few Fosters and written an outback novel."

Murnane, who was born in Melbourne in 1939 and now lives an intensely private life in western Victoria, has famously never left Australia, despite being internationally celebrated as a writer. While he rarely gives interviews, the author himself has described his lifestyle as deliberately minimalist, preferring the quiet rhythms of rural life to an intellectual scene. 

Murnane’s work focuses intensely on internal landscapes, memory, and perception. His narratives often explore the process of thinking and imagining than traditional plot progression. While his body of work also includes essays and poetry, we recommend new readers begin with his short fiction and his metafictional masterpieces which will transport you into the immersive outback of Gerald Murnane. 

The Plains (1982)

Start with Murnane’s breakthrough book, an experimental novella which introduced the world to his work. The Plains follows a filmmaker studying an abstract, mythical rural Australian landscape, using this premise to explore perception and imagination. Poet Ben Lerner, who wrote an introduction to this edition of the book, called it “a bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed.” (The New Yorker) 

Not currently available on Tertulia

Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane (2018)

This is the fullest collection of short stories by Murnane, who has been compared to masters of the genre such as Borges and Beckett. The collection is known for its portraiture of Australia, particularly through the famous story, "Land Deal," which imagines colonization and the plight of the indigenous people as a series of nested dreams.  “Reading Murnane, one cares less about what is happening in the story and more about what one is thinking about as one reads. The effect of his writing is to induce images in the reader’s own mind, and to hold the reader inside a world in which the reader is at every turn encouraged to turn his or her attention to those fast flocking images.” (The New York Times) 

Inland (1988)

In a series of fragmented mental landscapes, Inland explores love, memory and the fundamental solitude of life.  It follows the narrator’s contemplations from memories of Hungarian plains to horse racing to intimate relationships.

“Inland is a novel that…disrupts realist conventions about setting and sense of place. Murnane is a fastidious exponent of the prose sentence, which he often treats as a report of a remembered image. From the interconnected pattern of these image-sentences we gradually infer not a place out there, but the landscapes of a solitary mind.” (The Guardian)

Border Districts (2017)

In Border Districts, which Murnane prematurely announced to be his final work of fiction, a man moves from a capital city to a remote border town, where he intends to spend the last years of his life contemplating on what he has observed and, notably, read during his lifetime. The New York Times Book Review called it "a masterwork of introspection, possibly Murnane's most distilled and profound statement on the nature of consciousness."

Barley Patch (2009)

This book was Murnane’s first book in 14 years after a dry spell during which he thought he had given up on writing. The book begins with the question, ‘Must I write?,’ followed by a chronicle of the author’s inner imagination and memory, giving a glimpse into the creative process and how characters form inside the writer’s head. 

“This is capital L Literature, bursting with intent and ideas, but written as good Literature should be: pitching at street level, without affectation or arch, high-blown language. Barley Patch is a readily accessible test of the mind’s elasticity that should be recognized as a unique, timeless, and utterly satisfying work.”  (New York Journal of Books)

COMING SOON:

Landscape with Landscape (1985) 

This unclassifiable collection of linked narratives was not well reviewed when it was first released. ‘I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its early years,’ wrote Murnane in a foreward to a previous edition of the book. The stories trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 60s, as the writer grapples with the demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. A new edition of the book will be reissued in early 2026.