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Their Brilliant Careers
The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers
By: Ryan O'Neill
Paperback | 1 August 2016 | Edition Number 1
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Shortlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Ryan O’Neill has written a hilarious novel in the guise of sixteen biographies of (invented) Australian writers. Meet Rand Washington, hugely popular science fiction author (of Whiteman of Cor) and holder of extreme views on race and gender. Meet Rachel Deverall, who discovers the secret female source of the great literature of our time – and pays a terrible price for her discovery. Their Brilliant Careers is a playful set of stories, linked in many ways, which together form a memorable whole.
About the Author
Ryan O'Neill is the author of The Weight of a Human Heart. He was born in Glasgow in 1975 and has lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. His fiction has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings and Westerly. His work has won the Hal Porter and Roland Robinson awards and been shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Steele Rudd Award and the Age Short-Story Prize. He teaches at the University of Newcastle.
Industry Reviews
'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
ISBN: 9781863958639
ISBN-10: 1863958630
Published: 1st August 2016
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 288
Audience: General Adult
Publisher: Black Inc
Country of Publication: AU
Edition Number: 1
Dimensions (cm): 2.5 x 13.6 x 21
Weight (kg): 0.31
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