Description

High Noon at Starbucks is an eloquent and compelling exploration of human particularity in diverse cultural settings: the author’s hometown of Melbourne, Trumpite Florida, post-handover Hong Kong, and Switzerland. Its themes include mid-life experience, identity, mental and physical illness, gender, colonialism and the Holocaust. Whether comic, tragic or tragicomic, these stories are pervasively concerned with the complexities of the moral life. Their historical reach includes imaginative encounters with classics of nineteenth century fiction. Sophisticated but accessible, High Noon at Starbucks reminds us that fictional realism remains very much a going concern.

“Running through the volume is a comic element, transgressive as well as funny. These engrossing stories make for marvellous reading.”
– Hermina Burns, author of Bite of the Bluebottle and Edging Them Out

About the author: Richard Freadman is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University; he was the Founding Director of the Unit for Studies in Biography and Autobiography and an international authority on autobiography, biography and other forms of ‘life writing’. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he now works as a volunteer making life writing available to people in dementia care, palliative care and cancer remission settings. He writes and lectures on illness narrative, and continues to write autobiography and short fiction. He is married with three children and currently divides his time between Melbourne and Florida, where he has become an aficionado of alligators, and they, it seems to him, astonished observers of him.