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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'The brilliant new short story collection from the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of The Animals in That Country.
'A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.
'With her trademark humour, energy, and flair, McKay offers hallucinogenic glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans behave like animals and animals talk like humans.
'The stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerising ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Author's note: For Brea, Michelle, and Kelly. And for Peter.
Epigraph: Ah if life were not so fragile,
Death not so permanent - Ross McKay, 1977
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Individually published and award-winning stories are indexed on AustLit.
Contents
- Those Last Days of Summer, single work short story
- Cats at the Fire Front, single work short story
- Less, single work short story
- Flying Rods, single work short story
- Come and See It All the Way from Town, single work short story
- Lightning Man, single work short story
- Away with It, single work short story
- Nine Days, single work short story
- Reali"Craig Henderson. You are the most attractive real estate agent in the region. When 47 year old Jessica and I", single work poetry
- Smoko, single work short story
- Playhouse, single work short story
- Taking the Cat to Her New Home, single work short story
- Gunflower, single work short story
- Porthole, single work short story
- Getaways, single work short story
- Ranging, single work short story
- This Time, single work short story
- A Sensation of Whirling and a Loss of Balance, single work short story
- Territory, single work short story
- Twenty Twenty, single work short story
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
-
A Vast Network of Agencies
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2023;
— Review of Gunflower 2023 selected work short story'If pressed, I would describe Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower as a collection of stories about bodies. Divided into three sections—‘birth’, ‘life’ and ‘death’—the stories explore the way bodies, with all their needs and desires, are controlled, exploited and disregarded. Yet I like that this doesn’t quite get to the heart of them, that these stories don’t fit together as neatly as that.' (Introduction)
-
Pleasure and Peril : Short Stories about Embodiment
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 460 2023; (p. 43)
— Review of Gunflower 2023 selected work short story 'Laura Jean McKay’s new collection, Gunflower, offers a range of disturbing, deftly satiric, and sometime bizarre short stories. As in her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (2022), some of the stories in the collection explore the relationship between the human and non-human, and often challenge rational explanations or simple allegorical interpretations for the imaginative worlds they create. Even the conventional realist narratives sometimes defy generic conventions. The story ‘Flying Rods’, for example, moves from standard verisimilitude to Gothic horror. ‘Site’ transforms the familiar terrain of an adulterous affair with repeated descriptions of a ship sighted off the coast, such that the ship’s symbolic meanings remain tantalisingly unclear.'(Introduction)
-
Strength and Fragility Fused
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 21-22 October 2023; (p. 15)
— Review of Gunflower 2023 selected work short story -
Book Reviews : The Modern, Premonition, Gunflower
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , October 2023;
— Review of The Modern 2023 single work novel ; Gunflower 2023 selected work short story Also reviews The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto -
Living Through Allegory
2023
single work
essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2023;
-
‘Ballsy’, ‘very Funny’, ‘read in One Sitting’ : The Best Australian Books Out in October
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 4 October 2023;
— Review of Edenglassie 2023 single work novel ; Stone Yard Devotional 2023 single work novel ; Late : A Novel 2023 single work novel ; Killing for Country : A Family Story 2023 multi chapter work criticism ; Gunflower 2023 selected work short story ; The Man Who Wasn't There 2023 single work biography ; Home to Biloela 2023 single work autobiography -
Book Reviews : The Modern, Premonition, Gunflower
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , October 2023;
— Review of The Modern 2023 single work novel ; Gunflower 2023 selected work short story Also reviews The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto -
Strength and Fragility Fused
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 21-22 October 2023; (p. 15)
— Review of Gunflower 2023 selected work short story -
Pleasure and Peril : Short Stories about Embodiment
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 460 2023; (p. 43)
— Review of Gunflower 2023 selected work short story 'Laura Jean McKay’s new collection, Gunflower, offers a range of disturbing, deftly satiric, and sometime bizarre short stories. As in her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (2022), some of the stories in the collection explore the relationship between the human and non-human, and often challenge rational explanations or simple allegorical interpretations for the imaginative worlds they create. Even the conventional realist narratives sometimes defy generic conventions. The story ‘Flying Rods’, for example, moves from standard verisimilitude to Gothic horror. ‘Site’ transforms the familiar terrain of an adulterous affair with repeated descriptions of a ship sighted off the coast, such that the ship’s symbolic meanings remain tantalisingly unclear.'(Introduction)
-
A Vast Network of Agencies
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2023;
— Review of Gunflower 2023 selected work short story'If pressed, I would describe Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower as a collection of stories about bodies. Divided into three sections—‘birth’, ‘life’ and ‘death’—the stories explore the way bodies, with all their needs and desires, are controlled, exploited and disregarded. Yet I like that this doesn’t quite get to the heart of them, that these stories don’t fit together as neatly as that.' (Introduction)
-
y
Laura Jean McKay on Writing Our Present and Future
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2023
26992316
2023
single work
podcast
interview
'Laura Jean McKay is a fiction writer, and her latest work is the short story collection Gunflower. Her previous novel, The Animals in That Country, was awarded the international Arthur C. Clarke Award, as well as the Victorian Prize for Literature and the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year. Laura was awarded the NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022.' (Introduction)
-
Living Through Allegory
2023
single work
essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2023;
Awards
- 2024 longlisted APA Book Design Awards — Best Designed Literary Fiction / Poetry Cover designed by Laura Thomas.
- 2023 longlisted British Science Fiction Association Awards — Collection
