'Gerald Murnane has been at the game of fiction (or whatever it is he does) for a long time. His 1982 novel The Plains, with its dazzling invocation of the idea of landscape, made a world of readers realise fiction could be made abstract and lyrical.' (Introduction)

'At the very moment of his breakthrough, Gerald Murnane is threatening to disappear. The 79-year-old Australian writer—long considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, an association that speaks both to his genius and obscurity—is enjoying a rare moment in the sun. As he told The New York Times Magazine in a recent profile, “My publishing history’s just so checkered with sudden reversals, ups and downs, confusions, wrong turnings, and at the end of my life, virtually, it seems like things are starting to work out.” He has a new home with a major U.S. publisher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, after many years with various independent houses), which has released two volumes of work previously unavailable to a general American readership: Stream System, his collected short fiction, and Border Districts, a novel. Yet these books have the feeling of a farewell: The first is a career-spanning overview, while Murnane has said that the latter is his final work of fiction.' (Introduction)

'Born in 1939, Gerald Murnane is an Australian author of 14 books of memoir and fiction, each of which is wonderfully unusual in that it takes as its focus the mental images Murnane sees while he writes, the scenery surrounding those images and the way one mental image will lead to another and then another. Murnane’s books, apart from his early novel “The Plains,” aren’t about anything in the way that most fiction is about events and action among characters whose motivations interest the reader. Rather, the few thousand pages that Murnane has produced since his 1975 debut, “Tamarisk Row,” are a record of what he has seen when he tried to look at the place that is his own mind, and the effort of a lifetime that it has been for him to explore the inner reaches of this place through writing about it.' (Introduction)

'The Miles Franklin award is famously for “a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases”. That’s a very broad palette, yet for most of the award’s existence — 1957 to the present — it has recognised a rather narrow field of “Australian life”.' (Introduction)

'I first came to Border Districts through a brief description of it given to me by Gerald Murnane when I first met him three years ago. I thought he had told me that he did not think it was as complex as another work he wrote around the same time, A Million Windows.' (Introduction)