—The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
‘Perlman writes fiction with muscle … It’s provocative stuff.’
—People, Critic’s Choice
‘All of Perlman’s stories remain undeniably assured and carefully devised, and hold out nine complete and whole worlds for us to discover and contemplate.’
—San Francisco Chronicle
‘The nine tales here don’t just suggest an emerging voice, they show it well developed, stretching and flexing … marvelously realized, evocative and utterly original … Perlman continues to amaze and move.’
—New York Post
‘The details are perfect throughout … Perlman excels at creating tension … These stories are like walking down the hallway of an old hotel and eavesdropping on sad confessions. It’s hard not to be moved … These stories are love letters, really, and their protagonist, we come to learn, is none other than the human heart.’
—The Washington Post
‘Fans of Perlman’s grapplings with both the minutiae and the sweeping “big questions” of modern life won’t be disappointed … As a writer, Perlman’s obsession is with epic yet individual moments of truth when everything—from marriage to career to a person’s innate sense of right and wrong—seems up for grabs. Ambiguous indeed, but never less than compulsively readable.’
—Elle
‘Perlman mines pure narrative gold … insistently readable … provocative and powerful fiction from one of the best new writers on the international scene.’
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘The nine stories serve as a varied introduction to an accomplished stylist and storyteller … Presents satisfying rewards for the discerning reader.’
—The Seattle Times
‘Impressive … Evident in all of these stories are the writer’s talent and ambition … Perlman shows he has the skills to fully manifest the ambitions, ideas, perspectives and plots for the stories he wants to tell.’
—The Miami Herald
‘Perlman has a winner with this collection of nine eloquent short stories that examine the various natures of the human condition via a cast of remarkable characters.’
—The Sacramento Bee
‘Coldly luminous … dead-on … Perlman in full: mystery, tight dialogue, layers of irony.’
—Publishers Weekly
‘Perlman’s voices draw you in and hold you … The order of the stories makes Reasons a sort of literary sample tray, a gradual introduction to the full breadth of Perlman’s talents. “A Tale in Two Cities” [the final story in the collection] is almost worth the price of the book by itself.’
—The Boston Globe
‘Readers intrigued by Perlman’s well-received Seven Types of Ambiguity will be delighted that he has upped the ante with nine stories whose characters range from lawyers to immigrants … This story collection showcases the talent of young, Australian-born Perlman … expansively written with admirable control and generous detail, this is an excellent collection and is highly recommended for fiction collections.’
—Library Journal
‘Hopelessly conscious of embarrassing personal truths – the sort we realize, then yearn to forget – Perlman’s characters are erudite specialists of anomie. Hyperliterate and brutally funny, alternatively self-assured and self-loathing, they are mostly noble and deserving of our sympathy, even if we’re implicated in our schadenfreude. The effect might be depressing if Perlman didn’t show such care in imbuing his characters with devious charm … Scant evidence exists to suggest that casual flirtation with Perlman’s fiction will not end in total obsession.’
—The Believer
Praise for
Seven Types of Ambiguity
‘Bustling, kaleidoscopic … There are traces of Dickens’s range in Perlman and of George Eliot’s generous humanist spirit … This is an exciting gamble of a novel, one willing to lose its shirt in its bid to hold you … Stay with it for the long haul. It’s worth it.’
—The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice and Notable Book of the Year
‘This is a love story in the 19th century tradition, the kind that makes the real world seem a bit dim … George Eliot down under.’
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘Nuanced, dynamic storytelling, layered with essential digressions on everything from psychiatry to the stockmarket.’
—The Washington Post
‘Compulsively readable.’
—The New Yorker
‘Dazzling … a page turner, a psychological thriller that is, in short, dangerous, beguiling fun.’
—Newsweek
‘Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is an exemplary novel in the tradition of Thomas Hardy and the earlier D. H. Lawrence. Perlman’s power is in conveying the strife between personality and character in each of his protagonists. His prose, like his story itself, is vivid, humane, and finally optimistic in a manner that strengthens the reader’s perceptiveness.’
—Harold Bloom
‘Motives are tangled, perceptions unreliable, and outcomes unexpected … [Perlman] has created a novel with just the right amount of meaning, intelligence, and beauty.’
—The Boston Globe
‘An all-too-rare literary page-turner.’
—Library Journal
‘Perlman writes with such convincing simplicity – his sentences read like whiskey-fueled confessions … We can’t trust ourselves because Perlman makes us care too much.’
—Esquire
‘A brilliant book, written in the unadorned style of Raymond Carver, but with the wild metaphysical vision of a Thomas Pynchon. It is that most unusual thing – a novel that is both intellectually fun and spiritually harrowing.’
—The Baltimore Sun
‘Worthy of Dickens or Doctorow … almost impossible to put down.’
—BookPage
‘A sophisticated psychodrama.’
—The Wall Street Journal
‘Fast-moving, relentless but suspenseful … Perlman succeeds in illuminating the ambiguity inherent in lust, personal relationships, psychiatry and the law … Smart and edgy.’
—Booklist, starred review
‘Brilliant, absorbing … The scope of the novel is breathtaking but so intimately involving and densely plotted that it becomes that anomaly of a literate and urgent page-turner.’
—New York Post
‘One of the best novels of recent years, a complete success.’
—Le Monde (France)
‘The scope of [Perlman’s] ambition and the strength of his achievement in portraying the psychological state of the developed world is unrivalled … We feel ourselves spiralling closer to a truth that we could not have reached through other means … from a voice in the wilderness burdened with seeing the truth.’
—The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
‘A colossal achievement, a complicated, driven marathon of a book … The opening section is a tour de force … At the end, in a comprehensive, an almost Shakespearian way, Perlman picks up every loose thread and knots it.’
—The Observer (UK)
‘My novel of the year … Captures the Zeitgeist of contemporary Australia every bit as powerfully as The Corrections anatomised that of America.’
—Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph (UK)
‘One of those rare works of art that makes you realise the world is both a simpler and a more complex place.’
—London Evening Standard, a Book of the Year (UK)
‘This book’s true size is in its scope, its ambition, its emotional richness … Certainly, no novel has made this reviewer feel quite so sane in a long time.’
—Glasgow Herald (UK)
‘A complex and perfectly nuanced study of idealised love turned sour.’
—Daily Mail (UK)
‘Thoroughly involving and often surprising … A triumph of the suspenseful withholding of information, and a note-perfect final page
… A wise and generous book, a kind of less showy and more deeply humane version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.’
—The Guardian (UK)
‘Remarkable … Perlman builds up an unsettling, often sympathetic but always memorable picture of [his characters’] emotional lives, and of the coldly mercenary world they inhabit.’
—The Sunday Times (UK)
‘An impressive, iridescent, all-encompassing view of feeling.’
—Der Spiegel (Germany)
‘Has the virtues of the great modern European novel.’
—Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)
‘A literary sensation.’
—Deutschlandradio (Germany)
‘This is a deeply thoughtful, engaging, moving, exciting and utterly compelling book … It’s seven types of wonderful.’
—Sunday Telegraph
‘Where, critics have asked, is Australia’s equivalent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, or Philip Roth’s American Pastoral? Now, with Perlman’s achingly humane, richly layered and seamlessly constructed masterpiece, it seems that we have it.’
—The Canberra Times
‘Read it … A tour de force.’
—The Age
‘It is a pleasure to read a book that is so intelligently engaged with our time … and [whose] characters are so convincing.’
—Bookseller + Publisher
‘An elegantly constructed, wise and compassionate fable for our times, full of twists and turns and insights into the corners of human desire.’
—The Sunday Age
‘This is a novel that can make you feel you are entering the lives of the people sitting either side of you in the morning traffic … It does what novels once did but rarely can nowadays: It brings the news.’
—The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Perlman sees with painful clarity. Insights from a writer of this calibre are worth sharing.’
—The Australian
‘Seven Types of Ambiguity makes much Australian fiction of the past decade look wan and unambitious.’
—Herald Sun
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Three Dollars
9781742752983
Published by Random House Australia 2011
Copyright © Elliot Perlman
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage Book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW, 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
Addresses for companies with in the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices
First published by Picador, an imprint of
Pan Macmillan Australia, in 1998
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Perlman, Elliot, 1964-
Three Dollars / Elliot Perlman
ISBN 978 1 74275 297 6 (pbk)
A823.3
Cover design by Mary Callahan Design
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller © 1948, 1949, 1951, 1952, renewed 1975, 1976, 1979, 1980. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd in association with International Creative Management. Published by Methuen, an imprint of Random House (UK). ‘Bad Moon Rising' by John C. Fogarty © 1969 Jondora Music. For Australia & New Zealand: Warner/Chappell Music Australia Pty Ltd. ‘Shadowplay’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division © Joy Division.
Elliot Perlman, Three Dollars
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