Thanks to an online friend in Australia, I have a link to some hard to find Winton novels to complete my collection. Yay!

Scission came in the mail today. It's his first collection of short stories, before he was ever on the map. It's seriously wonderful. I haven't read it all, but the stories I've read so far are amazing and complex, even though the longest are only five or six pages.

"Wake", my favorite so far, has had me transfixed while I read it three times over this afternoon. It is so nuanced, so subtle. It appears to be the story of an abandoned husband, and you'd think that if you just breezed through the story. But upon reading it again, clues are found to show that there's much more to it. While the wife never appears, Winton manages to make her so visible by how the husband behaves. The things he does while she's gone, and more importantly, the things he doesn't do. I had put it down after the second time, then about an hour later I remembered something from it and had to retrieve it once more. On the third go around, yep, there's still more to it! Wow.

The lesson from this afternoon was to savor this collection slowly. Not to rush through and miss the details that turn the story inside out. Kind of like life? ( )

Only read the first story but that was enough to award high marks. Well written so that you are with the child and yet also outside looking on. ( )