Paper Bark Press
Untold Tales
David Malouf
1999, 64 pages, hardcover (cloth), 215x150mm
ISBN 90 5704 016 6
Cover photograph: 'Souvenir of Newport Beach 1978' by Max Dupain
In the four short narratives collected here, David Malouf explores some of the 'untold tales' behind familiar stories – historical, mythic and legendary – while at the same time offering a series of meditations on the role of folktales and storytelling in shaping human lives. In each of these tales, Malouf's skill as a storyteller is balanced by a poet's feel for language and by a contemplative approach to the ancient craft of narrative invention.
David Malouf is known throughout the world as a major Australian poet and novelist. He has won numerous prizes both in Australia and abroad.
'No contemporary literature is more insistently permeated by the spirit of the land than Australia's ... Mr. Malouf, the finest and most expansive of these writers, shares some of their darkly violent images of estrangement.'
~ Richard Eder, The New York Times, July 2000
'Malouf writes movingly in elegiac mode... The heightened, nearly hallucinatory clarity of Malouf's prose is well suited to describing dreams and portraying character, with profound psychological depth.'
~ The Washington Post Book World, July 2000
'David Malouf's Untold Tales is a small beautifully produced book ... Its four stories are based on tales told and retold, traditional stories as frequently repeated as the movement of waves over sand, yet Malouf has positioned in each something firm, original, thoughtful, a point of resistance that also seems part of the traditional story it resists ... They are confidently simple and perfectly composed.'
~ Brenda Walker, The Australian Review of Books, December 1999
'Malouf's Australia, as it figures in his poems, novels and stories, is a place of surprises and shifting possibilities. It is a youthful, sparsely settled country, but it is also very old, and Malouf is interested in the question of its age, and its populated and unpopulated history.'
~ The New York Times Book Review