Selected Stories by Keri Hulme

Edited and with an introduction by Nicole Rudick

Selected Stories, from the Booker Prize–winning author Keri Hulme, traipses knee-deep through the wild coasts, rivers, and speculative visions of the future in New Zealand.

Across this book of formally daring, lyrical and unsettling stories, humans are encountering flooding coastlines, animals that speak their own dark languages, and fractured memories where hard-won tenderness opens onto the mythic. In "One Whale, Singing," a pregnant woman in an unhappy relationship is contrasted with a pregnant humpback whale, swimming freely in the sea. It is only after their two lives intersect tragically that the woman can begin to feel tenderness toward her unborn child. In "Lost Possessions," an English teacher is kidnapped and held captive in a basement, where he keeps a diary in order to stay sane. As his reality continues to distort, he realizes this ordeal might in fact be a rite of passage linked to a former lover. In "Cicada's of Summer," a girl becomes obsessed with cicada's cycles of transformation, which turns cruel and destructive after her father withdraws into grief after his wife's death. Often rooted in Māori cosmology, Hulme's stories of desire, violence and environmental change fully commit to the deeply complex emotional life of her characters.

Edited by Nicole Rudic, these seventeen ecstatic short stories (written between 1974-2004, of which many have never before been published in the US), hope to re-introduce Keri Hulme as the overlooked but unforgettable and original writer that she was.

Keri Hulme (1947–2021) was a Māori writer and poet from New Zealand. Her only published novel, The Bone People (1984), won the Booker Prize, the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, and the Pegasus Prize for Literature. The Washington Post called it an “original, overwhelming, near-great work of literature.” The author of three books of poetry, Hulme published her short fiction in two collections: Te Kaihau/The Windeater (1986) and Stonefish (2004). She lived much of her adult life in the small coastal town of Ōkārito, on New Zealand’s South Island, in a house she built herself.

Nicole Rudick was born in Texas. Her book on Niki de Saint Phalle, What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined (Siglio Press) was called “innovative and kaleidoscopic” by Publishers Weekly. She is also the editor of Joanna Russ: Novels and Stories (Library of America), named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times. She writes writing regularly for The New York Review of Books on fiction and art.