The Complete Stories was published by Vintage Australia in 2007, collecting Malouf’s short fiction from three earlier volumes (Antipodes, 1985; Dream Stuff, 2000; and Every Move You Make, 2006) along with uncollected pieces. The gathering reveals the consistency and development of Malouf’s short fiction across thirty years: the same concerns — landscape, memory, transformation, the boundaries between worlds — explored with increasing refinement and concentration.
The early stories are predominantly set in Queensland and draw on Malouf’s personal history: childhood during the war, adolescence in subtropical Brisbane, the experience of being between cultures (Lebanese and English, Australian and European). They share with Johnno and 12 Edmondstone Street a vivid sense of place and a young man’s restlessness within provincial boundaries.
The later stories become more various in setting and subject — Italy, Greece, the Australian outback, suburban Sydney — but maintain Malouf’s characteristic approach: each story finds a moment of transformation, a point where the ordinary world opens onto something luminous or strange. A man encounters his dead parents in a supermarket. A girl on a beach discovers a dead whale. An old man in a garden suddenly sees his life whole. These moments are rendered without mysticism or sentimentality — they are presented as facts of consciousness, things that happen to attentive people.
The stories demonstrate that Malouf’s gifts — his ear for the music of prose, his eye for the physical world, his sense of how memory works — are equally effective at short and long distances.
Collecting The Complete Stories
First edition (Vintage Australia, Sydney, 2007): Trade paperback.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $15–$30
- UK/US hardcover editions: $20–$50