The Strong-Man from Piraeus and Other Stories

This collection provides an appealing introduction to the work, as well as life and times, of the celebrated Australian writers Johnston and Clift. Kinnane, an English instructor, discovered these unpublished pieces while examining the late authors' estate papers, and he supplies biographical background to help ""the stories here take on more meaning.'' Written during their expatriate years (after World War II to the 1960s), which the married couple spent in England and Europe, most of the fiction takes place in Italy and Greece. In Johnston's Astypalaian Knife, a young British scholar loses sight of his academic goals when he becomes immersed in the bucolic ways of a remote Greek island. In Clift's The Small Animus, an expatriate family in Greece anguishes over the slaughter of their pet rabbit. Johnston and Clift did collaborate (High Valley ; The Sponge Divers, but the stories collected here are individual efforts that are intriguing examples of the different ways male and female sensibilities transform experiences of the expatriate life into fiction. (October)