Readings.com.au: Janet Frame

The Daylight And The Dust: Selected Short Stories

A comprehensive selection of stories including five stories never before collected.

Written over four decades and including all of her best stories, this new selection illustrates Janet Frame’s dazzling versatility. Her themes range from childhood, to old age, death and beyond. Some stories are firmly rooted in realism and others in glorious fantasy. In Frame’s stories life is mysterrious and tragi-comedy often not far away. All are unique and powerful.

Janet Frame Stories And Poems

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Carpathians

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Owls Do Cry

Owls Do Cry is one of the classics of New Zealand literature, and has remained in print continuously for fifty years. A fiftieth anniversary edition was published in 2007. Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters. Regarded by many as one of the best New Zealand novels published, Owls Do Cry forms a loose trilogy with her two subsequent novels, Faces in the Water and The Edge of the Alphabet. "It is the sound that matters, finally, when I write - in fact all is for reading aloud." - Janet Frame, on publication of Owls Do Cry (1957)

A State Of Siege

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Angel At My Table

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The Goose Bath

Twice shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature, celebrated New Zealand writer Janet Frame (An Angel at My Table ) used to keep geese, using the base of an old garden fountain as their bath. In later years the geese went but the bath was brought indoors as a receptacle into which Janet piled her poems and jottings as she reworked and developed them. Over time the goose bath overflowed with paper, including hundreds of unpublished poems. By the time Janet died in 2004 she had named her hoped-for but elusive new selection The Goose Bath

From this treasure trove was selected over a hundred poems that illustrated the shape of her life: her childhood and the subsequent difficult years in mental hospitals; her travels around the world; her life as a writer, growing older and facing illness and death. The poems reveal her love for words, for cats, for the changing seasons, the arts and for her native country. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination.

Published in Frame's native New Zealand, this book became a Premier New Zealand Bestseller and went on to win the Poetry Section of the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. It is a beautiful and thought-provoking work, a lasting legacy from one of the Southern Hemisphere's most acclaimed writers. This Wilkins Farago edition is the first Australian editon.

An Angel At My Table

Gathered here in a single edition are the three parts of Janet Frame's autobiography.From a childhood and adolescence spent in a materially poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student and years of incarceration in mental hospitals (essentially for wanting to pursue a career as a poet), followed eventually by her entry into the saving world of writers and the 'Mirror City' that sustains them. This is not just the records of a life but also the flourishing of a writer's career. Janet Frame accomplishes 'the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors'.All three volumes of this autobiography - TO THE IS-LAND (1983), AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1984) and THE ENVOY FROM MIRROR CITY (1985) have won major literary prizes. Internationally lauded director Jane Campion made a film of AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE that won international jury prizes at Venice, Toronto and other film festivals.Janet Frame died in January 2004.

Yellow Flowers In The Antipodean Room

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Living In The Maniototo

A comic fantasy portraying the fortunes of a wandering novelist. Mavis Halleton, the heroine, is a woman of some fortitude and no small independence who manages to survive writer's block and widowhood as she makes her way from New Zealand to Berkeley, where friends of hers have agreed to let her live in their house while they are away on vacation. The opportunity to live rent-free in a quiet house for a few months while she finishes her novel turns into something more than she anticipated, however, when her friends die in an earthquake and leave behind a will turning everything over to her.

Reservoir

The Reservoir is a collection of stories, sketches, poetic fragments, and memoirs-as-short-story. Set mostly in the author's native New Zealand, these works depict humankind's battle against disillusionment and emptiness. In the title story, a little girl takes her first walk More... to a forbidden reservoir. The bad poet in 'The Chosen Image' struggles until self-deception wins out. Lauded as 'one of the great writers of our time' (San Francisco Chronicle), Frame displays her boundless imagination and magical use of language.

Scented Gardens For The Blind

An account of the troubles that befall a young girl when her parents' marriage collapses. Erlene Glace, a New Zealand schoolgirl, stops speaking altogether shortly after her father Edward leaves the family to settle in England. Vera, Erlene's mother, convinces Edward to return, and he travels home in the hope that his daughter's malady is reversible. A weird allegory that offers no obvious interpretation, "Scented Gardens for the Blind" manages to fascinate to the degree that it disturbs.

Pocket Mirror

Poems by Janet Frame.

Living In The Maniototo

Through the eyes of a woman of myriad personalities - ventriloquist, gossip and writer - Janet Frame playfully explores the process of writing fiction: the avoidances, interruptions and irrelevancies, as well as a teasing blurring between fact and fiction. The landscape of the Maniototo becomes 'the bloody plain' of the imagination, as the narrator tells us about her marriages and children, her friends (real and imagined), her travels (between New Zealand and the United States) and her stay in the house left in her care by friends travelling in Italy. She must face the reality of death as well as probe the authenticity of the modern world.* The Maniototo plains are in Central Otago, NZ

Faces In The Water

In Faces in the Water (first published in 1961), Janet Frame responded to her doctor's suggestion that 'as I was obviously suffering from the effects of my long stay in hospital in New Zealand, I should write my story of that time to give me a clearer view of the future.' This writing evolved into an intensely imagined, fictionalised account in which the protagonist, Istina Mavet, moves in and out of mental hospitals, facing the terrors of electric-shock treatment and the threat of a leucotomy. This riveting novel became an international classic translated into nine languages. Faces in the Water draws on the experiences of Janet Frame's early life, but it also explores the world of the mind - isolated and inarticulate - showcasing Frame's wisdom, compassion and genius.

Towards Another Summer

Sometimes, Grace thought, "no thank you" was the most chilling phrase in the English language. Janet Frame wrote this small and exquisite novel in 1963 whilst taking a break from her longest novel, The Adaptable Man. It's a highly personal work that she did not want published until after her death. Towards Another Summer is a meditation on the themes of exile and return, homesickness and not remembering where home is. The novel is suffused with beauty and tenderness and shot-through with self-deprecating humour and knowingness, and frailty. All of Frame's observational prowess is here in the vivid, heartbreaking passages about children and childhood and in Grace, the protagonist s, growing awareness of the deep-rooted forces of social convention and how demanding and exhausting it can be to try and fulfil the expectations of others. Grace is taking a break from writing a long novel and seems to be losing her grip on daily life in London. She feels more and more like a migratory bird as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life in England seem transitory. The desire to allow herself to become a bird and leave behind the social human agonies of appearing neither too clever nor too stupid, too helpful or too lazy, becomes overwhelming. A beautiful novel that demands reading, and re-reading. Staff review Towards Another Summer is an intensely autobiographical novel which Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most famous author (after perhaps Mansfield) wrote in 1963 while taking a break from another novel, and only allowed to be published after her death (Frame passed away in 2004). It is the delightful tale of successful young Kiwi author Grace Cleave and her travails whilst resident in the UK: trying to come to terms not just with the bleak landscapes and bitter cold of the Northern winter, but also the weight of expectation – for this most private and socially awkward of individuals – as a minor celebrity from a farflung land. An invitation to spend a weekend with a well-meaning family makes Grace wonder if she’s up to any sort of social interaction whatsoever. Memories of her childhood come flooding in, and she decides her real identity is not human, but rather that of a migratory bird, for whom “home” is a state of mind as much as a yearned-for place … Delicate, funny, poignant, wise – this is the Janet Frame New Zealanders, and all lovers of literature, revere! Martin Shaw, a New Zealand èmigrè, works at Readings Carlton