Aucklanders

Description

In the tradition of James Joyce's Dubliners, Murray Edmond brings us Aucklanders, short stories that celebrate lives lived in New Zealand's biggest city. Through different time-settings, and narrative styles, the tales are variously entertaining, funny, satirical, reflective and tragic. Sometimes they are a little gruesome or absurd. Yet these Aucklanders often feel oddly familiar. Among them we encounter a scared RSA waiter, a Zen sensei who keeps his followers guessing, a shy boy who breaks a neighbour's hothouse with his shanghai slingshot, a famous drunken artist with a tortured legacy, and a delivery driver with a side hustle. The stories variously evoke the hopeful exuberance of youth and love, the pain of heartbreak and loss, and the ambient excitement of a high school play about to begin.

Author description

Murray Edmond has published 16 books of poetry. Recent titles include Back Before You Know (2019), FARCE (2022) and Sandbank Sonnets (2022). His book of four novellas, Strait Men and Other Tales appeared in 2015. Noh Business (2005) was a study of the influence of Noh drama on Western theatre and Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writings (2014) brought together more than 30 years of criticism. In 2021 he published a cultural history, Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s. He has co-edited two poetry anthologies, The New Poets (1987) and Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975, and he was editor of the magazine Ka Mate Ka Ora: A Journal of New Zealand Poetry and Poetics from 2005 to 2020. He has been Dramaturge for Indian Ink Theatre Company from 1997 to 2023. He lives in Glen Eden in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand.