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THEIR BRILLIANT CAREERS

Ryan O'Neill

The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers

Absurd, original and highly addictive.

In THEIR BRILLIANT CAREERS, Ryan O'Neill has written a hilarious novel in the guise of sixteen biographies of (invented) Australian writers. Meet Rachel Deverall, who discovers the secret female source of the great literature of our time - and pays a terrible price for her discovery. Meet Rand Washington, hugely popular sci-fi author (of Whiteman of Cor) and holder of extreme views on race and gender. Meet Addison Tiller, the master of the bush yarn, “The Chekhov of Coolabah”, who has never travelled outside Sydney.

THEIR BRILLIANT CAREERS is a playful set of stories, linked in many ways, which together form a memorable whole. It is a wonderful comic tapestry of the writing life, and a large-scale parody in which every detail adds to the humour of the overall picture.

Ryan O'Neill is the author of The Weight of a Human Heart, which was published by Old Street in the UK and St Martin's in the USA. His fiction has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings and Westerly.
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Published 2016-08-01 by Black Inc.

Comments

Open this collection of stories and you will be astounded by the hugeness of the writer's heart, and by the breadth and depth of his vision. Ryan O'Neill is a writer of limitless imagination, unafraid to travel to the many dangerous and wonderful places that imagination takes him. ?Hector Tobar, bestselling author of The Barbarian Nurseries (praise for The Weight of a Human Heart)

[...] You have to admire O'Neill's delicious bravura. He's been one of the few short fiction writers of recent years willing to play around with the form's possibilities ... Apart from the fact there are more funny lines in O'Neill's 288 pages than there are likely to be in the entirety of Australian literature elsewhere this year, the profiles are woven smartly together, as the characters' fates and careers intertwine. -- Saturday Paper

Winner of the Prime Minister's literary prize for fiction 2017. Read more...

[...] Their Brilliant Careers brims with crackerjack wit. Pressure is subtly built; punchlines are explosive.' — Australian Book Review

UK: Eye Books;

[...] a piss-take, a celebration, a revisionist history and, perhaps most impressively, exceedingly good fun.' --Dominic Amerena, the Australian

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award 2017 Read more...

Vital storytelling and literary flourishes distinguish Scottish author O'Neill's creative story collection . . . there's also sex, clever narration, and illustrative graphics that add wit and whimsy. What brings all of the tonal diversity together is O'Neill's obvious understanding of the cohesiveness of language, its power to transcend and overcome, and the way an economy of precious words in a short story can achieve a novel's worth of emotion. ? (starred review, for The Weight of a Human Heart)

With the international scope of Nam Le's The Boat, the rooted sense of place in Anthony Doerr's The Shell Collector, and the playful wit of Jeanette Winterson's The World and Other Places, Ryan O'Neill may have written the best first collection of stories you're likely to read. If someone asked me to name my ideal collection of contemporary short fiction, I'd point to The Weight of a Human Heart and say, ‘This is it.' ?Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home (praise for The Weight of a Human Heart)

Daring, intelligent, witty, full of new discoveries and exhilarations. (for The Weight of a Human Heart)

[...] O'Neill has arranged a beautiful board of slain waxwings, no less funny or moving for being, in the final estimate of things, no more than shadows of the never living and the forever dead. -- Adam Rivett, Sydney Morning Herald

Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award 2017 Read more...

Both inventive and moving . . . Solving the riddles of his prose becomes addictive. (for The Weight of a Human Heart)