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'The best short fiction writers place their pens down and leave you with a haunting: a deep shifting of self, precipitated by impossibly few words.' -Maxine Beneba Clarke
In The Best Australian Stories 2017, Maxine Beneba Clarke - author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Hate Race and award-winning short story collection Foreign Soil - selects the most remarkable short fiction of the past year.
A woman sails to unfamiliar shores to start her life with a stranger. A boy goes to school one day and returns home twenty years older. The government erects a wall across the country and right down the middle of a marital bed.
Diverse in style and voice, these exceptional stories have been chosen by Clarke because they 'push and pull at our hearts, demanding entry into their chambers'.
Contributors include Dominic Amerena, Madeline Bailey, Tony Birch, Verity Borthwick, Raelee Chapman, Elizabeth Tien An Flux, Cassie Hamer, John Kinsella, Julie Koh, Melissa Lucashenko, Myfanwy McDonald, Jennifer Mills, Joshua Mostafa, Ryan O'Neill, David Oberg, Allee Richards, Mirandi Riwoe, Josephine Rowe, Joe Rubbo, Beejay Silcox and Ellen van Neerven.
About the author
Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer and poet of Afro-Caribbean descent. She is the author of the Indie and ABIA award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil (2014). Her most recent poetry collection Carrying The World won the 2017 Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry. Maxine is the author of the CBCA winning picture book The Patchwork Bike (a collaboration with Melbourne artist Van T Rudd) and her critically acclaimed memoir The Hate Race is being adapted for stage for Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre. She writes for the Saturday Paper.
