Futility and Other Animals

Description

Stories of modern, urban tribes. In some ways, the people in these stories are a tribe - a modern, urban tribe - which does not fully recognise itself as such. Some of the people are central members of the tribe while others are hermits who live on the fringe. The shared environment is both internal - anxieties, pleasures and confusions - and external - the houses, streets, hotels and experiences. The central dilemma is that of giving birth, of creating new life. The experiences of the inner city ambience are shown through stories of growing up, leaving home, coming to the city from the country, or returning there; first love affairs, hetero- or homosexual; and finding a peer group, a life style, an ideology, and the anti-ideology of Libertarianism.

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator but in the 1970s became a full-time writer. He has written twelve books of fiction and one non-fiction book. He has won a number of literary prizes including the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal for 1989. FORTY-SEVENTEEN was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in the New York Times and was named Book of the Year by The Age and 'moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. GRAND DAYS, the first of the Palais des Nations novels, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction. DARK PALACE won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.