GEOFF DEAN: The Literary Lunch
The Literary Lunch: Selected stories
by Geoffrey Field Dean
Edited by Giles Hugo
2004; ISBN 0 9756797 0 8; RRP: $22.95
Available here at $20
This is a book to read in the heart of the city, with people milling all around, pigeons, dirt, gritty with life, and is a book to be read, then shared, and never forgotten.
(Bianca Ferguson, University of Melbourne, writing in 2005 in the then-titled, JAS Review of Books.)
Review by Cameron Woodhead, The Age, Review section: Books
Saturday, January 8, 2005.
TASMANIAN author Geoffrey Dean has been writing short stories for almost 50 years and has pretty much perfected the craft. The Literary Lunch is an impressive collection of his work. Dean writes with a controlled lyricism – his prose is welded to an unpretentiousness that both counterpoises and intensifies its musicality. At the same time, he displays a dark, satirical streak: tales of sinister clowns at the Adelaide Writers Week, or the boy who gets kicked out of a posh school for revealin g his father’s ignominious profession, are written with Dean’s unique self-denigrating flair and a talent for dissecting pomposity. He’s a writer’s writer and his vision of the author resembles that of Proust’s Bergotte: a character capable of artistic heroism only by virtue of his abject human failings. In spite of that (or perhaps because of it) Dean has won many awards and plaudits from nearly every quarter. He deserves the praise; his short fiction is among the best in the country.”
