Last Letter to a Reader

‘Has any writer ever paraded his aesthetic privacies so shamelessly? It doesn’t matter. These are the ravings of a genius. Ignore them if you dare, literature-besotted unraveller.’ Peter Craven, Australian Book Review ---- ‘The best book about Murnane’s books that anyone is ever likely to write.’ Shannon Burns, The Monthly ---- ‘When looking over the endless paddocks of his fictions, one is also looking out at the mysterious landscape of the soul.’ Dustin Illingworth, New York Times Book Review ---- ‘Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.’ Teju Cole ---- ‘The emotional conviction…is so intense, the sombre lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiselled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.’ J. M. Coetzee ---- ‘An enigmatic author, possibly the best you’ve never heard of . . . His work insists on the reality of the inner world – perhaps even its primacy.’ Melissa Harrison, Financial Times ---- ‘Immediately arresting . . . Murnane’s writing exhibits what literature should: an insight into a way of seeing that is quite unlike our own.’ John Self, Irish Times ---- ‘As with Proust, the specificities of the images he pursues and catalogues provide their own pleasure [but] the effect of his writing is less about the images themselves, and more about the way thought works in the human mind.’ Chris Power, The Guardian ---- ‘Murnane’s fantasies are many-layered, and the narration weaves between these and his mundane life in thrillingly long, lyrical sentences.” Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books