A Million Windows - by Gerald Murnane (Paperback)

About the Book

A kaleidoscopic meditation on fiction-making by one of Australia's most acclaimed writers.

Book Synopsis

A kaleidoscopic meditation on the glories and pitfalls of storytelling.
"The house of fiction," wrote Henry James, "has . . . not one window, but a million." Gerald Murnane takes these words as his starting point, and asks: Who, exactly, are that house's residents, and what do they see from their respective rooms? Focusing on the importance of trust and the ever-present risk of betrayal in writing as in life, these nested stories explore the fraught relationships between author and reader, child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane's fiction is woven from images -- the reflections of the setting sun on distant windowpanes, seemingly limitless grasslands, a procession of dark-haired women, a clearing in a forest, the colors indigo and silver-grey, and the mysterious death of a young woman -- which build to an emotional climax that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of its patterning.

Review Quotes

Praise for Gerald Murnane and A Million Windows

"An exploration of the mind and of literary creation, it is a book of intricate construction and vast intellectual scope....I found myself marveling at Murnane's intellectual power and originality, acknowledging respect for an artist so devoted to the precise execution of a demanding aesthetic."--James McNamara, The New York Times

"A genius on the level of Beckett."--Teju Cole, author of Open City

"[Murnane's] emotional conviction . . . is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiseled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief."--J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

"[A] beautiful and strange tale...[an] astonishing feat by a writer of profound conviction."--Michael Autrey, Booklist

"Murnane is a master of breathing life into fiction, and his compilation of ideas on the subject holds immense value because those ideas are often so idiosyncratic and contrarian."--Publishers Weekly

"Murnane is a writer of such precision and irony that one hesitates to describe A Million Windows except to say that it will fascinate (and amuse and provoke) anyone who has driven past that house of 'two, or perhaps three, storeys, ' and wondered what exactly was going on inside."--Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

"An extraordinary and consistently compelling read from beginning to end."--Midwest Book Review

"It compels the reader to question the relationship between fiction and reality, the visible and invisible world, probing the rapport between the author-as-narrator and the reader-as-partner in literary discourse."--Eugene Bacon, World Literature Today