Patrick Carey

Flynn, and there was a buzz around him because the book was so amazing.

It's of such high quality.

The rights had been sold.

And there was this story about him working in publishing and coming up with the golden egg of publishing an instant bestseller.

But let's turn our minds firstly to Deborah Adelaide and her collection of short stories, Zebra.

Deborah Adelaide is an editor, reviewer and writer of non-fiction as well as a novelist.

She also happens, Kate, to teach creative writing at the University of Technology in Sydney.

And previous novels of hers include The Household Guide to Dying and The Women's Pages.

Well, the structure of short story collections is always fascinating, I think.

In fact, Kate, I've alluded to this before, but I wrote an honest thesis about exactly this.

What is the line between a collection of short stories and a novel?

What is the importance of the sequence, the arrangement, the thematic concerns?

And at what point do they just become one work?

Yeah, and if you weren't looking out for it, you mightn't notice it at all, but it is a quite fun little device that she uses throughout the structure of the book.

And as I said last week, I'm a particular fan of the second person.

It is a tricky thing, but it's a great device for getting you inside the mind of the narrator, which is in fact you, but isn't you because it's the person who's sidled up to you and is telling you something.

It's quite a tricky game writing in the second person.

Why don't we talk about the first story, which is called dismembering.

It's in the first person.

And a woman who we know is Genevieve wakes up from a dream, a very, very vivid dream, where she and her ex-husband had been burying a dismembered body in the backyard.