Margins
Futility and Other Animals book cover
Futility and Other Animals
1981
First Published
3.85
Average Rating
178
Number of Pages

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.

Avg Rating
3.85
Number of Ratings
55
5 STARS
27%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
31%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
4%
goodreads

Author

Frank Moorhouse
Author · 19 books

Frank Thomas Moorhouse AM (21 December 1938 – 26 June 2022) was an Australian writer. He won major Australian national prizes for the short story, the novel, the essay, and for script writing. His work has been published in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States and also translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian, and Swedish. Moorhouse was perhaps best known for winning the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel, Dark Palace; which together with Grand Days and Cold Light, the "Edith Trilogy" is a fictional account of the League of Nations, which trace the strange, convoluted life of a young woman who enters the world of diplomacy in the 1920s through to her involvement in the newly formed International Atomic Energy Agency after World War II. The author of 18 books, Moorhouse became a full-time fiction writer during the 1970s, also writing essays, short stories, journalism and film, radio and TV scripts. In his early career he developed a narrative structure which he has described as the 'discontinuous narrative'. He lived for many years in Balmain, where together with Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes, he became part of the "Sydney Push" - an anti-censorship movement that protested against rightwing politics and championed freedom of speech and sexual liberation. In 1975 he played a fundamental role in the evolution of copyright law in Australia in the case University of New South Wales v Moorhouse. - Wikipedia

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