Morris Lurie – Hybrid Publishers

Cleaning The Stables

Diane — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 22:38:28 +0000

Shortly before his death in 2014, an elderly man brought his publisher friend a crumpled purple folder filled with type-written pages. Cleaning the Stables he called it: a selection of stories, poems and a recipe that he didn’t want left behind.

In this posthumous collection we are given a feast of mostly unpublished treasures from the great literary life of Morris Lurie. Written in the wry and ironic style he was celebrated for, these pieces are sometimes odd, always clever, and at times profoundly moving as they give us insight into a man who had a truly unique way of interpreting and writing about the world around him.

Hergesheimer in the Present Tense

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 07:21:55 +0000

Read SMH review: The world that conspires against the older artist

Thirty stories in the incomparably distinctive voice of the author whose publishing career started with the comic novel Rappaport. One story starts with “I won a house in a lottery”, and proceeds to career seemingly out of control – except it isn’t. Other stories open in equally startling fashion.

Try: “Hergesheimer flees his marriage in a twenty-four-year-old car …”; “How do you steal from a thief?”; “Show me a man without tantrum and I’ll show you a man without blood”; “The prettiest damsel in many a moon drops a smile in Hergesheimer’s direction, which he, ever the gallant, snatches expertly up, with a bow courteously returns.”

Lurie’s vast body of work includes novels, short stories, non-fiction collections and children’s books, among them his first comic novel Rappaport, his autobiography Whole Life and a book voted by Australian schoolchildren as their favourite, The Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race. He has been compared with acclaimed American Jewish writers such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen.

Rappaport Compleat (ebook only, not available from this site)

admin — Mon, 27 Jul 2015 13:51:22 +0000

Ebook now available from Amazon Kindle, Google books and Apple iBooks.
This ebook brings together two of Lurie’s novels, the comic Rappaport, which focuses on a day in the life of a young Melbourne antique dealer and his immature friend, Friedlander, and Rappaport’s Revenge where the characters, transplanted to London, are further chronicled. These are followed by several short stories: “Rappaport Lays an Egg”, “The Death of Rappaport”, “Dirty Friends”, “Rappaport Dragged Over the Coals,” “Rappaport Takes Lunch”, and “Rappaport and Friedlander Meet in Heaven”.
Lurie has been compared with acclaimed American Jewish writers such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen. Morris Lurie died on 8 October 2014. His unique voice will be sorely missed.

Born in Melbourne, Morris Lurie (1938–2014) was one of Australia’s most prolific writers, centring himself firmly in the fabulist tradition, or, more colloquially, as a spinner of yarns. The son of Jewish immigrant parents, Lurie, like Judah Waten before him, explored the conflict between the New World and the Old in compassionate, yet humorous, terms, finding a voice for hundreds of thousands of people caught up in the postwar migration.
His vast body of work includes novels, short stories, non-fiction collections and children’s books, among them his first comic novel Rappaport, his autobiography Whole Life and a book voted by Australian schoolchildren as their favourite, The Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the steady and voluminous flow of his work, Lurie was always a professional craftsman. His style is colloquial and confessional, brimming with witty aphorisms and incisive dialogue. His humour teeters on the brink of the absurd, often the anarchistic, and his later works showed a considerable freedom of imagination. Lurie is best known for his short stories. He was published in many prestigious magazines including The New Yorker, The Virginia Quarterly, Punch, The Times, The Telegraph Magazine, Transatlantic Review, Island, Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant and Westerly.
Morris Lurie was the recipient of the Patrick White Award in 2006.

To Light Attained

admin — Mon, 27 Jul 2015 10:37:56 +0000

“Lurie’s 2008 volume, To Light Attained, is, in my own view, his masterpiece, so far. It needed fourteen years to find a publisher … Lurie is the best writer of the circumfluent sentence of anyone, anywhere, anytime.” John Bryson, Quadrant 2012

Highly innovative, personal and idiosyncratic; Lurie’s poetic use of language tells the story of a man whose daughter commits suicide and how he deals with it. Lurie has been compared with acclaimed American writers such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen.

Listen to Morris Lurie talking to Ramona Koval on ‘The Book Show’:
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2008/10/bsw_20081020_1005.mp3

Morris Lurie’s vast body of work includes novels, short stories, non-fiction collections and children’s books, among them his first comic novel Rappaport, his autobiography Whole Life and a book voted by Australian schoolchildren as their favourite, The Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race.