When she isn't writing true crime nonfiction, the Australian author Helen Garner (The Children's Bach; How to End a Story) turns out memorable novels of women and their challenges, many of them dealing with unfaithful or otherwise unsavory men. The same is true with her short fiction, as readers will see in Stories: The Collected Short Fiction. Take "Postcards from Surfers," in which an unnamed young woman--many of the protagonists are not named--and her parents visit an aunt who lives in an apartment building by the shore. The young woman devotes much of her time to writing a series of postcards that reveal long-suppressed trauma at the hands of her father.
That piece sets the tone for the superb works that follow. "Little Helen's Sunday Afternoon" is an extraordinary story in which a young girl makes life-altering discoveries when she stands outside a shed behind a relative's home and hears two people inside making "a noise like somebody using sandpaper on a piece of wood, but softer." "Did He Pay?" is about a guitarist who plays in seedy dives, and the repercussions of his irresponsible approach to life. And "My Hard Heart" tells of a woman coming to terms with her husband's sudden announcement that he's moving out. These stories are snack bites compared to the feast of novels like the now-classic Monkey Grip, but they're an excellent introduction to one of the world's best contemporary writers. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer