Frank Moorhouse is probably best known in his homeland, but he deserves wider recognition. It may happen soon as a result of "the reissue of Moorhouse's complete backlist" this year by Knopf Vintage.Susan Wyndham includes this snippet of data in a long post about new appointments at publisher Random House, on the Undercover blog.
The post is slightly unusual in that it appears on a week day. Normally, Undercover gets updated on Friday evening in time for the distribution of the Saturday edition of The Sydney Morning Herald. The same content that appears on Undercover is published in the newspaper's Spectrum supplement.
It'll be interesting to see if Knopf publishes the (once?) scurrilous The Illegal Relatives. The book, which contains no date, was published in the 1970s. It was his first published book and there's a story behind it.This drawing is scanned from the book, which is now very hard to find and is priced accordingly. I apologise to visitors who thought this was a family-friendly blog. Well, it's not.
2 comments:
I have a tattered copy of this book. I'm fairly sure it wasn't his first pubished book, though. If I recall correctly, Futility and Other Animals, and maybe even The Americans, Baby were already in print.
You're correct. It was his third book, published in 1973 according to the AustLit database, which includes this:
'Moorhouse had prepared an anti-censorship set of three stories called The Illegal Relatives but held up publication because he wanted to revise them. Eventually the printer went ahead with this volume without the author's permission.' (G. M. Gillard, 'The New Writing: Whodunnit?' Meanjin 40.2, 1981, p. 173)
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