Someone Else
By (Author) John Hughes
Giramondo Publishing Co
Giramondo Publishing Co
1st July 2007
Australia
General
Fiction
Short stories
A824
Winner of Queensland Premier's Literary Awards: Australian Short Story Collection- Arts Queensland Steele Rudd 2008
Paperback
206
InSomeone Elseaward-winning essayist John Hughes pays homage to twenty one artists, writers and musicians who have had a formative influence on his imagination.
From Chekhov and Borges and Beckett, to Proust, Rothko and Cage each essay brings its subject to life in unexpected ways. Kafka rewrites the parable of Abraham and Isaac, with no one to stay Abraham's knife. Wittgenstein considers the relationship between turtles and time. Bob Dylan stars in a fantasy of travellers and deserts and women with knives and silver earrings. Just around the corner from where Hughes works, Dostoyevsky fries kidneys in the kitchen of his Stanley Street terrace
LikeThe Idea of Home, Someone Elseuses the essay as a form of autobiography. Here, however, the essays are fictions. Or are they Hughes tells the stories of the figures who live in his mind by making them tell his stories and in doing so engages in an art of literary ventriloquism.