Dream Stuff was published by Chatto & Windus in 2000. The collection contains nine stories, each exploring — in different ways — the relationship between the real and the imagined, the waking and the dreaming, the present and the remembered. The title (from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”) signals Malouf’s interest in the insubstantiality of what we take to be solid reality.
The stories range across Australian and European settings. “Lone Pine” follows a man visiting Gallipoli who encounters the ghost of a digger. “At Schindler’s” describes an encounter in a Viennese cafe that may or may not be a hallucination. “Blacksoil Country” traces a man’s return to a Queensland landscape transformed by memory and time. Each story finds the moment where the firm ground of reality becomes uncertain — where dreams, memories, or imaginings intrude upon the world and cannot be clearly distinguished from it.
Malouf’s prose in these stories is at its most concentrated and musical: each sentence is weighted, each image precise, each silence significant. The stories are not long — most are between ten and twenty pages — but they achieve an emotional density that longer works sometimes cannot. Their brevity is part of their power: like poems, they leave spaces for the reader to inhabit.
The collection confirmed Malouf’s reputation as one of the finest prose stylists in English — a writer for whom the sentence is the fundamental unit of composition, and whose attention to the music of language never diminishes his engagement with human experience.
Collecting Dream Stuff
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 2000): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20