Malouf, David 1934- (George Joseph David Malouf)

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Malouf, David 1934- (George Joseph David Malouf)

PERSONAL:

Surname is pronounced "Ma-louf"; born March 20, 1934, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; son of George and Welcome Malouf. Education: University of Queensland, B.A. (with honors), 1955. Politics: Socialist.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Chippendale, New South Wales, Australia. Agent—Rogers, Coleridge, and White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN, England.

CAREER:

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, assistant lecturer in English, 1955-57; St. Anselm's College, Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, schoolmaster, 1962-68; University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, lecturer in English, 1968-77. Member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, 1972-74.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, both 1974, and James Cook University of North Queensland Award from the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, 1975, all for Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems; Australian Council fellowship, Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1978; New South Wales Premier's Fiction Award, 1979, for An Imaginary Life; The Age Book of the Year Award and award for fiction, both 1982, both for Fly away Peter; Victorian Premier's Award, 1985, for Antipodes; New South Wales Premier's award for drama, 1987, for Blood Relations; Miles Franklin Award, Commonwealth Prize for Fiction, and Prix Fémina Étranger, all 1991, all for The Great World; New South Wales Premier's Literary Award, 1993, for Remembering Babylon; Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, Booker Prize nomination, Commonwealth Writers Prize, Miles Franklin Award, and Prix Femina Etranger, all 1994, and IMPAC/Dublin Literary Award, 1996, all for Remembering Babylon; Boyer Lecturer, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1998; Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, 2000, for Dream Stuff; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 2000.

WRITINGS:

Bicycle and Other Poems, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1970, published as The Year of the Foxes and Other Poems, Braziller (New York, NY), 1979.

(Coeditor) We Took Their Orders and Are Dead: An Anti-war Anthology, Ure Smith, 1971.

Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1974, 2nd edition, 1980.

Johnno (novel), University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1975, Braziller (New York, NY), 1978, reprinted, 1998.

(Editor) Gesture of a Hand (poetry anthology), Holt (New South Wales, Australia), 1975.

Poems, 1975-1976, Prism (Sydney, Australia), 1976.

An Imaginary Life (novel), Braziller (New York, NY), 1978, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Katharine Brisbane and R.F. Brissenden) New Currents in Australian Writing, Angus & Robertson (North Ryde, New South Wales, Australia), 1978.

Wild Lemons (poems), Angus & Robertson (London, England), 1980.

First Things Last (poems), University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1981.

Selected Poems, Angus & Robertson (London, England), 1981.

Child's Play [and] The Bread of Time to Come (novellas), Braziller (New York, NY), 1981, The Bread of Time to Come published as Fly away Peter, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1982.

Child's Play [and] "Eustace" [and] "The Prowler," Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1982, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1998.

Harland's Half Acre (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1984.

Twelve Edmondstone Street (memoir), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1985.

Antipodes (short stories), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1985.

Voss (libretto), 1986.

Blood Relations (play), Currency Press, 1988.

David Malouf: Johnno, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, and Interview, edited by James Tulip, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1990.

The Great World (historical novel), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1990, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1990.

La Mer de Glace (libretto), 1991.

Poems 1959-89, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1992.

Remembering Babylon (historical novel), Pantheon (New York, NY), 1993.

Selected Poems, 1959-1989, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1994.

Baa Baa Black Sheep: An Opera in Three Acts (libretto), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

The Conversations at Curlow Creek, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1996.

Fly away Peter, Vintage (New York, NY), 1998.

A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness, ABC Books for the Australian Broadcasting Company (Australia), 1998.

Untold Tales, Paper Bark (Brooklyn, New South Wales, Australia), 1999.

Dream Stuff (stories), Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2000.

Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance, Black Inc. (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), 2003.

The Valley of Lagoons, Tuskar Rock Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2006.

The Complete Stories, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Every Move You Make (stories), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 2007.

Typewriter Music, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 2007.

Revolving Days (poems), University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 2008.

Contributor to books, including Four Poets: David Malouf, Don Maynard, Judith Green, Rodney Hall, Cheshires, 1962; and The Fox and the Magpie, Boosey and Hawkes (London, England), 1998. Author of introduction to Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999. Contributor to periodicals, including the Australian, New York Review of Books, Poetry Australia, Southerly, and Sydney Morning Herald.

SIDELIGHTS:

A prize-winning poet before he published his first novel, David Malouf was born and raised in Australia, lived for some years in Italy, and now resides in his native Australia. Many critics believe Malouf writes as comfortably about cosmopolitan Europe as he does about his childhood home, and the author's favored themes and literary devices also traverse his poetry and prose. Reviewers have praised the vivid, sensuous descriptions and evocative settings of his works, throughout which Malouf weaves an awareness of the distinct cultures and the diverse characters within them. Malouf often combines the past, present, and future to create an all-inclusive, multidirectional point of reference, and he is interested in dualities that repel and compel and searches for perfect unities with nature. Matthew Condon, writing in the Courier-Mail, called Malouf a "world-renowned novelist, librettist, essayist and poet who has steadily produced a body of work undiminished in quality since his first book, Bicycle and Other Poems (1970)."

Fleur Adcock commented in a Times Literary Supplement review of Malouf's 1980 poetry collection, First Things Last, that the author "has a strong visual consciousness with a sense of joyful absorption in the natural world which makes the overworked word ‘celebration’ irresistible." Malouf revels in nature's various forms—from paradisiacal gardens to wilderness, from life in the ocean to wild lemon trees—in attempts to harmonize with nature. For example, in "The Crab Feast" the poet searches for crabs so that he can ingest, embody, and join with them. Music harmonizes with nature as well, and in the poem "An die Musik," man, music, and nature integrate: "We might have known it always: music / is the landscape we move through in our dreams," Adcock quoted.

In First Things Last Malouf also experiments with time, creating a present contemporaneously with the past and future. As Adcock explained: "In an elegy for his father he writes of the dead being buried in the living and looking out through their eyes, as do the not yet born." And in the poem "Deception Bay," Malouf writes of his ancestors viewing the future through the eyes of the present generation. The author also experiments with prose poetry and other free-verse forms, yet he generally emphasizes his content more than technique. Critics have called his poetry mature, elegant, fine, and lavish, and have lauded Malouf for his sensitivity and emotion. Adcock concluded that "Malouf's powerful imagination allows a certain amount of surrealism…. [He] can be playful … but he is a serious poet concerned with serious things."

Malouf's first novel, Johnno, was published in 1975. Reviewing the work for the Times Literary Supplement, Frank Pike commended the author for his resonant depiction of place and atmosphere: Malouf creates "an unaffected and densely detailed evocation of a particular way of life at a particular time; urban, unspectacular." According to Pike, the novel commences "with a convincing account, finely written without fine writing, of childhood and early adolescence" in suburban Brisbane during World War II. The story follows the rocky friendship of the honorable but impressionable narrator, Dante, and Johnno, an intriguing, disturbed, fatherless youth. Dante is attracted to Johnno's fondness for carousing and heavy drinking and tries unsuccessfully to mimic his behavior. After Johnno departs for the Congo the youths meet again in Paris, but by now the narrator is warier of his old hero's unstable behavior. Afterward in Australia, Dante receives news of Johnno's death by drowning, an event that confirms Dante's early suspicions that Johnno was suicidal. Dante then receives an angst-ridden note from Johnno written prior to his death, in which he cites Dante's emotional indifference and restraint as reasons for his suicide.

In 1979 Malouf was awarded the New South Wales Premier's prize for fiction for his second novel, An Imaginary Life, a fictionalized account of the ancient Roman poet Ovid's mature years. From the sketchy information available on the Roman's later days, Malouf created a life for the poet as he imagined it to have transpired after Ovid was exiled from Rome in 8 C.E. The circumstances that led to Ovid's banishment are unclear. Many historians hold that the poet was banished as punishment for ridiculing the Emperor Augustus's wife, Livia, in his just-completed epic poem "Metamorphoses." Others believe he was exiled for arranging a lovers' tryst for Augustus's granddaughter Julia, and still more suspect it was Ovid's writing of the intemperate "Art of Love" at a time when Augustus was calling for virtue in Roman society. Nonetheless, Malouf fills in the blanks to create what Katha Pollitt, writing for the New York Times Book Review, deemed "an extraordinary novel" and "a work of unusual intelligence and imagination, at once sensuous and quirky, full of surprising images and intriguing insights."

Malouf depicts an aging Ovid who was once at the heart of pleasure-seeking Roman society but is now forced to inhabit the desolate reaches of the known world. He settles at Tomis, a grim village of one hundred huts in modern Romania on the Black Sea, whose barren land supports vegetation the poet cannot even identify. Malouf makes such a setting seemingly tangible in An Imaginary Life, prompting Pollitt to comment: "Mr. Malouf's [prose] is indeed fine: a spare yet evocative English that captures both the bleak monochromes of Tomis and the sunny humanized landscape of Ovid's remembered Italy, without ever losing the distinctive voice, now caustic, now dreamlike, in which Ovid tells his own story." Kate Eldred, writing in the New Republic, asserted: "Malouf shows us the mind of a great wordsmith struck dumb in his surroundings trying to adjust to a new life." Pollitt stated that An Imaginary Life is "one of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to your friends." Eldred, impressed with Malouf's manipulation of time, remarked that the author "interplays the historical present, [which is] clumsy in English, with a narrative present and an anecdotal past tense, interweaving them so gracefully that the techniques aren't obvious, only the aftertaste of grandeur in certain passages, of a facile rhythm in others."

Harland's Half Acre, Malouf's 1984 novel, also garnered critical praise. It opens with protagonist Frank Harland living with his brothers and bemused father at Killarney, the remainder of what was once an expansive farm in the Australian countryside. Jim Crace, in a review for the Times Literary Supplement, commended Malouf for his polished descriptions: the "opening chapters are … stunningly artful evocations of Queen- sland and Queenslanders. The Harland acres (‘lush country but of the green, subtropical kind, with sawmills in untidy paddocks’) are squandered with ‘extravagant folly’ through drink, gambling, debt and neglect." Hearing fantastic tales of the glory of Killarney spun by his father, Frank dreams of restoring the farm to its original grandeur as a gift to his family. Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Post Book World, called Harland's Half Acre "a rewarding book … long on intelligence and feeling," and commended the author for writing "a meditation on the subtle, mysterious relationship between life and art…. He has written it with great sensitivity."

Malouf's 1982 novella, Fly away Peter, for which he won the Book of the Year Award and a fiction award from the Australian literary journal The Age, also commences in Australia. After spending twelve years in England, protagonist Ashley Crowther returns to a thousand-acre plantation he inherited in his native Queensland, but he is unsure of what to do with it or his future. Already inhabiting this land is Jim Saddler, a young man who is content with a simple existence among nature, observing the numerous species of birds that migrate to the swamps there. Ashley decides to make the estate a wildlife reserve and hires Jim to manage it. They befriend a nature photographer, Imogen Harcourt, and the three settle into a serene life until World War I disrupts the calm.

The men enlist, and at the front encounter the horrors of war. "The scenes in the trenches," wrote Alan Brownjohn in the Times Literary Supplement, "are much the finest in Fly Away Peter: men passing down the slope from fields where peasants continue to till the ground and birds continue to sing, to enter that labyrinth of mud, rats, and twitching bodies from which they will never return, or never return the same." Ashley, far removed from the individualistic living practiced at the plantation, becomes disillusioned, concluding that men are as cogs in machines—indistinct and replaceable. Imogen, still in Australia, thinks the fighting is absurd and senseless and concludes that a purpose is not necessary in life.

Malouf made Italy the setting for his 1982 novella, Child's Play, a first-person narrative told by a young terrorist preparing to assassinate an internationally acclaimed author. Times Literary Supplement reviewer Peter Kemp described the work as "surreally hard-edged," adding that "the world Child's Play projects is one where details have a hallucinatory vividness and patterns stand out with stark clarity: only significance remains creepily opaque." The two short stories bound with Child's Play, "Eustace" and "The Prowler," take place in Australia. They, like Child's Play and Johnno, focus on society's fascination with elusive, sordid characters and demonstrate the author's preoccupation with the interaction of opposites. "Conformity, community, security are repeatedly set against anarchy, loneliness, danger," Kemp observed. "Obsessively, [Malouf's] work juxtaposes order and disturbance, light and dark. Those positives and negatives can unexpectedly change places. And always in Malouf's stories the powerful attraction between seemingly opposed poles is used to generate some shock effects."

Also focusing on disparities is Malouf's 1985 collection of thirteen short stories, Antipodes. The tales follow new Australian immigrants and the problems they encounter in their attempts to assimilate into a new culture, and the stories also examine the tribulations of Australians in Europe.

Malouf's The Great World, an epic spanning some seventy years, examines the intertwined lives of two Australians, Vic Curran and Digger Keen, in a structure "juxtaposing scenes of past and future as a kind of continuous present," reported Ray Willbanks in World Literature Today. The two men are first drawn together in 1942 as prisoners of the Japanese during World War II, surviving three and a half years of brutal captivity in Malaya and Thailand. They are assigned to a work gang laboring in construction of the infamous Bangkok-Rangoon Railway, encamped in an abandoned amusement park called "The Great World." New York Review of Books critic Ian Buruma described The Great World as a "superb new novel" containing "one of the most horrifying and vivid descriptions of the death railroad camps I have read. The rotting wounds, the maddening fevers, the casual sadism of the Japanese and Korean guards, the terror of cholera, of giving in to fate, of becoming what in Auschwitz camp jargon was called a Musulman, a doomed man already in the grip of death." Elizabeth Ward, writing in the Washington Post Book World, observed that their experience results in "a profound alteration in these men's sense of reality," and "both carry the horror of their memories—dormant but never dead, like malaria—permanently." Even worse, perhaps, than the physical abuse and deprivation is their loss of identity.

Remembering Babylon, set in the 1840s, "examines the fragility of identity from within a band of 19th-century British colonials, who have scratched out a home in the Australian bush," according to Suzanne Berne in the New York Times Book Review. The group is transformed with the arrival of Gemmy Fairley, a British-born young man who survived being thrown overboard from a British ship at age thirteen. He washed up on a Queensland shore and lived a wandering existence with the Aborigines for sixteen years before stumbling into the colony. "There's little plot," Catherine Foster observed in the Christian Science Monitor. "Malouf roams from mind to mind of the various town residents as they react to Gemmy or try to make sense of him. Malouf generously lets us see as much of the other residents as of this gibberish-spouting character whose other, British, self slowly reemerges." Gemmy develops into a richly "multifaceted" character, "at turns human, at turns brutal," noted Berne, and in Remembering Babylon the author "adroitly limns each of these shifting projections, sympathetically portraying the desperation of human exile with its terrors, its possibilities, its unlikely opportunities for grace." Gemmy, "a white man with Aboriginal ways, represents a primitive immigrant's worst confusion: the man in the right skin but the wrong tribe," Time contributor R.Z. Sheppard wrote. "He is a reminder of instincts caged but not tamed by civilization. That such a creature has much to teach can be even more upsetting."

Malouf continues to explore the theme of the contrast between Australia and Europe in the morality tale Conversations at Curlow Creek, published in 1997. The novel tells the story of two Irishmen—one a police officer, the other a criminal—during a long night of conversation set in the gloomy Australian outback hours before the criminal's execution. A Booklist reviewer Brad Hooper praised the novel for being "intellectually rigorous," and a Kirkus Reviews contributor called it "an audacious and deeply moving meditation … on freedom and identity."

Malouf is also well known and well regarded as a writer of short stories, represented in several critically acclaimed collections. His short story work "has been significant and not simply an incidental exercise to his work in the novel form," observed Booklist reviewer Hooper. In the collection Dream Stuff, Malouf's "dense, often dark prose is balanced by the blinding insights that come in the dreams and hazy half-lives that give the book its title," stated Lancet reviewer Rebecca J. Davies. The stories, Davies continued, display an "elegance and ambition that places them among the best this accomplished author has written." A reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented: "Of the nine stories gathered in Malouf's latest collection, most are excellent, and one—‘Great Day,’ the final entry—is outstanding." The story follows the events of a single day, the seventy-second birthday of former government advisor Audley Tyler, which also happens to coincide with Australia's national holiday. Malouf explores not only the confluence of man and nation but also the internal structure of a large, extended family. In another story, Jack, the young narrator of "At Schindler's," lives with his mother at a boarding house by the sea. Jack's father went missing in action in World War II, and Jack is anxiously awaiting any news of his father's whereabouts. When Jack discovers his mother having sex with an American soldier, he thinks he also sees his father's ghost mournfully observing the scene. In reality, it is Jack's reflection in a pane of glass. After this discovery, Jack must reluctantly take on adult realities and accept that his father is not going to return. "Almost all of the stories here are superb, evocative creations," stated Rebecca Miller in a Library Journal review. "If the questions Malouf raises are deliberately never fully answered, this compelling exploration of the contemporary Australian nation and the courage it takes to open your eyes when all about have theirs shut is truly dazzling," commented Davies. In assessing the collection, Book reviewer Dan Koenig observed that "Malouf writes with grace, insight, and a perfection of craft that often transcends his subjects."

Malouf's The Complete Stories, published in 2007, contains his entire short fiction output to that date, plus several previously unpublished works. As evidenced by these thirty-one stories, Malouf's "imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity," commented a Publishers Weekly contributor. In "The Prowler," hysteria and panic erupt in a suburban area plagued by a rapist who seems to have the ability to move about at will while evading capture by the authorities. The protagonists of "Lone Pine," a vacationing couple, are terrorized and murdered by a deranged young man. "Elsewhere" explores the tragedy of family estrangement as a father makes the grim trek into Sydney to attend his daughter's wake and funeral. The sixteen-year-old narrator of "The Valley of Lagoons" is finally allowed to visit the mysterious titular lagoon, which his friends have been visiting for years, and finds himself profoundly changed by the experience. "Southern Skies" addresses not only Australian identity but the place of humans within the universe in the story of an astronomer who helps teach a teenage boy about the mysteries of the heavens. The works collected here are representa- tive of a "quarter-century of a formidable craftsman's career," noted the Publishers Weekly reviewer. A Kirkus Reviews writer called Malouf "Australia's poet of loneliness" and called The Complete Stories a "superb collection of stories that are quiet, assured, lyrical, aching."

Every Move You Make is a "transcendent story collection" in which Malouf "explores the intimate dramas of ordinary lives," remarked Michael Fitzgerald in Time International. A composer is inspired to awe when his wife sings his music in "The Domestic Cantata." The protagonist of "War Baby" faces his imminent departure to the war in Vietnam by resurrecting the memory of his father, who served in World War II. In the title story, a woman falls in love with a man who is destined to always remain mysterious and unfathomable to her. "For those still unfamiliar with his work, this new septet of short stories provides an invaluable introduction to one of Australia's most eloquent and meaningful voices," commented Nicholas Dunlop in Antipodes. "If this marvellous collection has a flaw, it is perhaps in the sheer virtuosity on display," mused Dunlop. "Contemplative, ethereal, sharply perceptive, this collection is a fascinating exploration of the inner worlds that separate and connect us all," concluded New Statesman contributor Mary Fitzgerald.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Hansson, Karin, Sheer Edge: Aspects of Identity in David Malouf's Writing, Lund University Press (Lund, Sweden), 1991.

Indyk, Ivor, David Malouf, Oxford University Press (Melbourne, Australia), 1993.

Malouf, David, Twelve Edmondstone Street, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1985.

Neilsen, Philip, Imagined Lives: A Study of David Malouf, University of Queensland Press (Queensland, Australia), 1990.

Nettelbeck, Amanda, Provisional Maps: Critical Essays on David Malouf, Center for Studies in Australian Literature (Nedlands, Australia), 1994.

Nettelbeck, Amanda, Reading David Malouf, Sydney University Press (Sydney, Australia), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Antipodes, June, 2007, Nicholas Dunlop, "Malouf's New Collection Meditates on Life and Loss," review of Every Move You Make, p. 87.

Book, September, 2000, Dan Koenig, review of Dream Stuff, p. 83.

Booklist, December 1, 1996, Brad Hooper, review of The Conversations at Curlow Creek, p. 641; May 15, 2000, Nancy Pearl, review of Dream Stuff, p. 1728; June 1, 2007, Brad Hooper, review of The Complete Stories, p. 35.

Christian Science Monitor, October 21, 1993, Catherine Foster, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 15.

Courier-Mail (Queensland, Australia), June 1, 2007, Matthew Condon, "Photographic Memories," profile of David Malouf.

Economist, November 16, 1996, review of The Conversations at Curlow Creek, p. S18.

Entertainment Weekly, July 27, 2007, Karen Valby, review of The Complete Stories, p. 70.

Guardian Weekly (London, England), August 8, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 29.

Journal of Australian Studies, January, 2007, Brigid Rooney, "Remembering Inheritance: David Malouf and the Literary Cultivation of Nation," p. 65.

Kenyon Review, June 22, 2002, Jennifer Lavasseur and Kevin Rabalais, "Public Dreaming," interview with David Malouf, p. 164.

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1996 review of The Conversations at Curlow Creek, p. 1557; May 1, 2007, review of The Complete Stories.

Lancet, September 16, 2000, Rebecca J. Davies, "Colonial Dreaming," review of Dream Stuff, p. 1041.

Library Journal, June 15, 2000, Rebecca Miller, review of Dream Stuff, p. 120; July 1, 2007, Joshua Cohen, review of The Complete Stories, p. 87.

Listener, January 9, 1986, review of Antipodes, p. 29; February 13, 1986, review of Twelve Edmondstone Street, p. 28; April 5, 1990, review of The Great World, p. 32.

London Review of Books, May 8, 1986, review of Twelve Edmondstone Street, p. 19; April 19, 1990, review of The Great World, p. 20; June 10, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, pp. 28-29.

New Republic, May 13, 1978, Kate Eldred, review of An Imaginary Life, p. 36.

New Statesman, May 7, 1993, Guy Mannes-Abbott, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 40; September 16, 2000, "Colonial Dreaming," p. 1041; January 22, 2007, Mary Fitzgerald, "Deafening Silences," review of Every Move You Make, p. 60.

New Yorker, August 12, 1991, review of The Great World, p. 79; November 1, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 131.

New York Review of Books, July 19, 1990, Ian Buruma, review of The Great World, p. 43; December 2, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 13.

New York Times, July 14, 1978, review of An Imaginary Life, p. C25; October 19, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. C19.

New York Times Book Review, April 23, 1978, Katha Pollitt, review of An Imaginary Life, p. 10; February 10, 1985, review of An Imaginary Life, p. 40; June 22, 1986, review of Harland's Half Acre, p. 34; March 31, 1991, Vince Passaro, review of The Great World, p. 20; October 17, 1993, Suzanne Berne, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 7; December 5, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 64; January 19, 1997, Brooke Allen, review of The Conversations at Curlow Creek, p. 10; August 20, 2000, Michael Wood, "Boomerang Lives," review of Dream Stuff, p. 9; December 23, 2001, Scott Veale, review of Dream Stuff, p. 16.

Observer (London, England), February 2, 1986, review of Antipodes, p. 28; April 8, 1990, review of The Great World, p. 58; May 5, 1991, review of The Great World, p. 61; May 30, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 63.

Publishers Weekly, May 1, 2000, review of Dream Stuff, p. 47; April 30, 2007, review of The Complete Stories, p. 134; May 28, 2007, Kris Coyne, "PW Talks with David Malouf: Where All Lives Tend: Harsh Surroundings and Random Violence Mark the Collected Stories, Bringing Together 25 Years of Australian Malouf's Shorter Work," p. 34.

Time, October 25, 1993, R.Z. Sheppard, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 82; January 3, 1994, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 79.

Time International, October 9, 2006, Michael Fitzgerald, "Never a Dull Moment," review of Every Move You Make, p. 61.

Times Literary Supplement, April 9, 1976, Frank Pike, review of Johnno, p. 445; September 22, 1978, review of An Imaginary Life, p. 1056; January 29, 1982, Fleur Adcock, review of First Things Last, p. 114; May 21, 1982, Peter Kemp, review of Child's Play, p. 549; October 15, 1982, Alan Brownjohn, review of Fly away Peter, p. 1141; June 15, 1984, Jim Crace, review of Harland's Half Acre, p. 658; February 8, 1985, review of Antipodes, p. 140; April 6, 1990, review of The Great World, p. 375; May 7, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 20.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), November 28, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 6.

Wall Street Journal, May 8, 1991, review of The Great World, p. A10; October 25, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. A18.

Washington Post Book World, September 26, 1984, Jonathan Yardley, review of Harland's Half Acre, p. 1; March 24, 1991, Elizabeth Ward, review of The Great World, p. 8; September 5, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 9; October 31, 1993, review of Remembering Babylon, p. 12.

World Literature Today, summer, 1991, Ray Willbanks, review of The Great World, p. 543; autumn, 2000, David Draper Clark, "David Malouf Chronology," p. 706, "David Malouf Selected Bibliography," p. 708; autumn, 2000, John Scheckter, "Dreaming Wholeness: David Malouf's New Stories," p. 740; autumn, 2000, Peter Pierce, "What Dreams May Come," review of Dream Stuff, p. 750.