The Americans, Baby
By (Author) Frank Moorhouse
Random House Australia
Vintage (Australia)
1st February 2008
Australia
General
Fiction
A823
Paperback
336
Width 132mm, Height 200mm, Spine 23mm
264g
A timeless collection of stories exploring physical and psychological boundaries, some tentatively and others with vigour. In The Americans, Baby the milieu is a Sydney under-40 population who, hoping that being earnest or outrageous will make them feel real, are left saturated with anxiety instead. An inherent resistance to American cultural intrusions and the risks that those from a great powerful land such as the US take when they meddle in another culture (they can be snared, seduced, destroyed) are explored with traditional Moorhouse flair and wit. These stories are timeless in their concerns, and explore ideology, idealism, conflict, relationships and sex.
Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator but in the 1970s became a full-time writer. He has written twelve books of fiction and one non-fiction book. He has won a number of literary prizes including the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal for 1989. FORTY-SEVENTEEN was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in the New York Times and was named Book of the Year by The Age and 'moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. GRAND DAYS, the first of the Palais des Nations novels, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction. DARK PALACE won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.