The List of All Answers: Collected stories
Viking, $29.95 pb, 339 pp
Fiction
The List of All Answers: Collected stories by Peter Goldsworthy
by Gail Jones •
Susan Sontag has identified in contemporary fiction what she calls an ‘impatient, ardent and elliptical’ drive. These are features, above all, of the well-wrought story, and they are also adjectives that well describe its inherent paradox: the story is contained but somehow urgent, intensified but working in a system of concision, suggestive but employing referential exorbitance. Four pages might betoken an entire world.
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