The Unfair Dinkum

Welcome to The Living Library, also known as the Flesh and Blood Lending Facility. Here people do not check out books, but actual writers. You check them out, take them home for a few weeks, and then bring them back. If the writer is dead, you check out a sack of his remains. Sounds reasonable, the sort of place anyone would want to work. And our narrator is fairly happy, until one day his routine is disrupted by Joey Rue, an Australian writer who has the impertinence to check himself out of the library and precipitate an adventure which takes him, and our narrator, across vast tracts of perilous land in search of the ‘Unfair Dinkum’. And what is that? You need to read the book to find that out, cobber. “Whenever I start reading a book by Rhys Hughes, I find myself thinking “He can’t possibly get away with this.” Hughes breaks all the rules of polite bourgeois writing and even some of the rules of impolite non-bourgeois writing, moving the story along often by sheer force of will and through linguistic acrobatics. If he was in the Iowa Writers Workshop, they would have excommunicated him after the first week, and probably expelled him from the state of Iowa altogether.” (from the introduction by Brian Evenson)