> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 February 2008
  • ISBN: 9781740511384
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $19.99

Futility and Other Animals




Stories of modern, urban tribes.

Stories of modern, urban tribes.

In some ways, the people in these stories are a tribe - a modern, urban tribe - which does not fully recognise itself as such. Some of the people are central members of the tribe while others are hermits who live on the fringe. The shared environment is both internal - anxieties, pleasures and confusions - and external - the houses, streets, hotels and experiences. The central dilemma is that of giving birth, of creating new life.

The experiences of the inner city ambience are shown through stories of growing up, leaving home, coming to the city from the country, or returning there; first love affairs, hetero- or homosexual; and finding a peer group, a life style, an ideology, and the anti-ideology of Libertarianism.

  • Published: 1 February 2008
  • ISBN: 9781740511384
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $19.99

About the author

Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator and in 1970s became a full-time writer. He won national prizes for his fiction, non-fiction, and essays. He was best known for the highly acclaimed Edith trilogy, Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Cold Light, novels which follow the career of an Australian woman in the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s through to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970s as she struggled to become a diplomat. His last book The Drover’s Wifea reading adventure published in October 2017, brings together works inspired by Henry Lawson’s story and examines the attachment Australia has to the story and to Russell Drysdale’s painting of the same name. Frank was awarded a number of fellowships including writer in residence at King’s College Cambridge, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. His work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was made a Doctor of the University by Griffith University in 1997 and a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by the University of Sydney, 2015. Frank Moorhouse died, in Sydney, on 26 June 2022.

Also by Frank Moorhouse

See all

Praise for Futility and Other Animals

The most important collection of stories we have had for a long time.

Peter Cowan, Westerly

An impressionistic account of young rebels against suburban conformity, lovers, homosexuals, and intellectuals confronting the problems of individual integrity and crises in their relationships.

Brian Kiernan, The Australian

Moorhouse has moved into a whole new area of material, of experience, of sensibility for Australian fiction.

Michael Wilding, Southerly

Moorhouse is living Sydney, trying to make a living by writing. God help him. If he does not make it then there is just no hope for the creative life in Australia. He is an exciting talent.

John Miles, The Adelaide Advertiser
penguin pop image
penguin pop image