| Author | Ryan O'Neill |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short story collection |
| Publisher | Black Inc |
Publication date | 1 August 2016 |
| Publication place | Australia |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 240 pp. |
| Awards | 2017 Prime Minister's Literary Awards — Fiction, winner |
| ISBN | 9781863958639 |
Their Brilliant Careers is a 2016 short story collection by the Australian author Ryan O'Neill. [1]
It was the winner of the 2017 Prime Minister's Literary Awards for Fiction. [2]
The collection consists of 15 short stories, all published here for the first time, each of which is a biography of a different fictional Australian writer.
Writing in Australian Book Review critic David Wright described the book as "a chocolate box of parodic Aussie portraits: some are bitter, some have gooey sentimental hearts, and some are just plain nuts." He went on to note that the book "brims with crackerjack wit" and that it "is interconnected in a way that tests believability, but so too are the real events into which its web entwines." [3]
While reviewing each of the books on the short list for the 2017 Miles Franklin Award writer Jen Webb pondered how close the author sails "to the wind of defamation", before commenting: "Like a supremely confident stand-up comic, he pushes the joke from initial humour through infuriating repetition to helpless laughter...Literary giant after literary giant, publisher after publisher, is kneecapped by these excoriating and hilarious accounts of the players, their work, and the impossibly interwoven lives they lead." [4]
After the novel's initial publication in Australia by Black Inc, it was reprinted in the UK by Lightning Books in 2018. [7]