| | This is the 2nd of 12 for the Book Awards Reading Challenge. Thea Astley (1925 – 2006) was an Australian writer of novels and short stories. Hunting the Wild Pineapple is a collection of her stories, published in 1979 and winning the James Cook Foundation of Australian Literature Studies Award in 1980. The stories are connected in that they all take place in North Queensland and they have the same narrator. His one-leggedness has made him an outsider and thus a cynical observer of life in small-town Australia. He takes aim at mouth-breathing men, bored wives, snotty teens, untalented poets, censorious clerics, and callous hippies. The stories are funny like Flannery O’Connor. That is, funny until they get fierce, intense, disturbing. For instance, "Ladies Need Only Apply" is a forceful study of misogyny and self-hatred. Readers interested in Australian life and Queensland in particular or human struggles in general will like these stories.
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| | Posted 2/13/2009 5:11 AM - 28 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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