Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

Murnane writes of himself as a boy making racehorses of his marbles, a pastime and obsession shared with Jack Kerouac; as a writer, working his first ten years in secret; as a reader, trying to understand the mystery of writing a good sentence by way of Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost; and as a teacher, exploring the endless ways in which words can express the contours of our thoughts. From these and other vantage points, Murnane peers into the hidden landscapes that lie within, or just beyond, the everyday details of Australian life. Carrying the reader with him across the valleys, plains, and grasslands of his mind, Murnane here gives us a guided tour through an immersive landscape in which every word has its own space, shape and weight.