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  • Published: 26 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746623
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 292

Loose Living




A book of comic writing that incisively dissects our contemporary new sensitivities.

A book of comic writing that incisively dissects our contemporary new sensitivities.

How our Hero came to be a cultural ambassador in France fell into strange company; how he encountered the Duc and his entourage; how Europe responded to his Australian ways; how refinement eluded him; how the queen of commas almost brought him down by tugging his rope; how he became an honoured member of the Montaigne Clinic for civilised disorders; and how he began to discover the good life and how to get it when disaster struck. As Australia turns to Asia, Moorhouse's hero is permitted one last look at Europe.

Loose Living is his dispatches home, detailing his arrival in the wondrously civilised world of France; his glittering life at the chateau with the Duc; his fall into disgrace at the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus; and his appointment as Gregarious Fellow at the Montaigne Clinic for Civilised disorders, deep in the Pyrenees. Incorporating Cuisine Cruelle compiled by Chef Bilson and the Duc.

  • Published: 26 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746623
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 292

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.

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Praise for Loose Living

Moorhouse has the meanest eye and ear for the cultural cliche since Mark Twain.

Don Anderson

The effect is unexpected, exhilarating, disorienting, sometimes hilarious ... He makes you laugh, and think.

Angela Carter, The New York Times