Author Description

Product Description Collects stories related to travel by authors such as Geoffrey Bewley, Gerard Windsor, David Malouf, Kate Grenville, and Elizabeth Jolley From Publishers Weekly In this collection of short stories, Australian writersincluding Elizabeth Jolley, Frank Moorhouse and Andrew Taylorexplore the theme of travel and the sensibility of Australians who venture away from home. Croswell, a Sydney writer and literary agent, notes in her introduction that "busy, air conditioned airports and 'international' hotels can provide just as fruitful a source of the travel experience as vistas of snow, wastelands of desert and the threatening landscape of uncharted territories." Moorhouse's "The New York Bell Captain" is a comic horror story about the exaggerated self-consciousness of a tourist in Manhattan. In Taylor's "The Absolutely Ordinary Family," a solitary woman observes a vacationing family and realizes that she will always watch the drama of other people's lives from the outside. In "The Fellow Passenger," Jolley reveals the inner voyage of a middle-aged doctor on a cruise. Unfortunately, not all the tales here are as entertaining and perceptive as these threemost of the the other journeys in this volume are incomplete. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.