Seven Short Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

"A new standard for the short story genre that will be hard to surpass."--"Library Journal"In these prize-winning, "heartbreakingly nuanced" ("Speakeasy") stories, Janette Turner Hospital explores the infinite incarnations of loss--lovers meeting again in midlife re-experience, through the memory of photographs both real and imagined, the passion that both frightened and thrilled them; a young dental hygienist adrift, living in a hostel in northern Australia, receives a heart-wrenching visit from her drug-dependent brother; a mother and adolescent daughter move into a new house, and their sense of safety is shaken when the previous owner reappears, desperate to reclaim what he has lost. Hospital's characters oscillate between estrangement and intense connectedness, between a permanent sense of dislocation and a yearning to belong.

Genres: Short Stories, Australia, Fiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2003

About the author

Born in 1942, Janette Turner Hospital grew up on the steamy sub-tropical coast of Australia in the north-eastern state of Queensland. She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States.

Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) where it won an 'Atlantic First' citation in 1978. Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in l977) won Canada's $50,000 Seal Award in l982. She lived for many years in Canada and in 1986 she was listed as by the Toronto Globe & Mail as one of Canada's 'Ten Best Young Fiction Writers'. Since then she has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and four short story collections and her work has been published in multiple foreign language collections. Three of her short stories appeared in Britain's annual Best Short Stories in English in their year of publication and one of these, 'Unperformed Experiments Have No Results', was selected for The Best of the Best, an anthology of the decade in l995.

The Last Magician, her fifth novel, was listed by Publishers' Weekly as one of the 12 best novels published in 1992 in the USA and was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'. Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for Australia's Miles Franklin Prize Award and for Canada's Trillium Award, and in England it was listed in 'Best Books of the Year' by The Observer, which noted "Oyster is a tour de force… Turner Hospital is one of the best female novelists writing in English." In the USA, Oyster was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'.

Due Preparations for the Plague won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award in 2003, the Davitt Award from Sisters in Crime for "best crime novel of the year by an Australian woman”, and was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award. In 2003, Hospital received the Patrick White Award, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland.

Orpheus Lost, her most recent novel, was one of five finalists for the $110,000 Australia-Asia Literary prize in 2008.

Orpheus Lost was also on Booklist's Top 30 novels of the year in 2008, along with novels by Booker Prize winner Anne Enright, National Book Award winner Denis Johnson, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, Ian MacEwan, Ha Jin, and Michael Chabon.

The novel also made the list of Best 25 Books of the Year of Library Journal, and Hospital was invited to be a keynote speaker at the annual convention of the American Library Association in Los Angeles in June 2008.

The Italian edition, Orfeo Perduto, has been so well-received in Italy that it will be a featured title at the literary festival on Lake Maggiore in June 2010 where Hospital will be a featured author.

She holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and in 2003 received the Russell Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences, conferred by the university for the most significant faculty contribution (research, publication, teaching and service) in a given year.

Reviews

[notgettingenough]

I'm afraid this will be going on my rapidly growing shelf 'Books you won't read before you die.' But who am I to be giving lectures, I hadn't heard of Hospital until I speculatively handed over $1 for this in an op shop.

And wow, what an investment that turned out to be. She's gone straight to the top of my list of short story writers. She's good at the lot. Describing trees - usually an eyes-glaze-over time for me, her voice is always true, vivid settings and tight stories. Well, maybe I shouldn't have said that about her voice. Her Australian voices are absolutely dinkum. I'm not the one to make the judgement about the ones set in the US, but I have an expectation not to be disappointed there either.

rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...

[Annabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

We studied this as part of our final year Literature class and, in contrast to almost all studied books, I still love it and I recommend it to just about everyone who shows even the vaguest interest in good Literature.

Turner Hospital transforms the most ordinary things into complex and grittily beautiful stories which reach up off the page and grab you and don't let go even once you've finished. I still, having not read it in over a year, will think about these stories and admire her writing. The words capture so much of the sounds in her lyrical prose and you can almost feel the oppressive Queensland heat leaching out of the pages into your hands, surrounding your heart.

But, I should warn you, these stories are dark - black, like the inside of an executioners hood.

The fainthearted would be best to read them in bright, busy places but I can't promise you that you won't remember them when you're standing in the dark waiting for that bus...

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

The smallness of life, the hugeness of pain, the way we make our way through it every day and survive to do it again tomorrow. These stories are beautiful and haunting, unsentimental but not so bleak as to be nihilistic. This is the every day struggle, the pain of carrying around histories that we'd rather forget. At once universal and intimately personal. Exquisite.

[Henry Tang · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of stories about loss, strung together like shards of glass on a string.

[Misha · Rating 4 out of 5]

BookList: The haunting floral scent of frangipani permeates this riveting short-story collection from the Australian author of the novel Due Preparations for the Plague [BKL My 15 03]. Hospital’s strength lies in capturing her character’s interior lives with a poet’s grace and precision. The subjects of each story vary, from a mother and daughter whose new home is threatened by its mysterious previous tenant to lovers who reimagine their affair through a series of photographs, but the most powerful are those featuring childhood friends Brian and Philippa, whose intense bond may still not be enough to save them from their inner demons. The collection is thematically linked: each story explores the geographies and memories that define and bind us even as they change shape over time. How we embroider past events or alter and manipulate memories from actual occurrences are key elements in many of the tales. Like Patrick White’s solitary explorer Voss (to whom one story alludes), Hospital’s characters are continually in search of a homeland they may never return to and, perhaps, will never find. -- MishaStone (BookList, 08-01-2004, p1899)

[Ma'lis Wendt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetic and rather dark short stories with a mostly Australian focus. Fascinating book.