Million-story City: Fiction and Screenplays

Two guys named Tom Bone. A spaceman speaking only lyrics from pop songs, confusing the aliens. A Gogol-esque telesales agent with a dog problem. A return to a desolate Australian mining town. Cowboys, detectives and witches, unlike you’ve ever seen them. An irate email to Sepp Blatter. Wise children. Musings on whisky, the sea and the end of the damn world.

Marcus Preece was one of the most interesting writers you’ve never heard of. Before his death in 2017 at fifty-three, the filmmaker, teacher and editor had completed dozens of short stories, screenplays, comics, poems and music journalism; he left behind incomplete drafts of dozens more.

Malu Halasa, herself an author and editor with ten books to her name, was a friend of Preece, and his de facto literary executor; this book collects the best of his finished writings.

This collection includes short stories, screenplays, comics and other writings. With a profound sense of justice and suspicion toward social changes made in the name of progress, Preece is firmly on the side of the underdogs: refugees, alienated office workers and underground rap collectives, lost souls.

The centrepiece of the book is Million-Story City, a fabulous place populated by highly original characters, where storybook conventions mix and flow in a sequence of tales pitched perfectly for both adult and younger readers.

Unexpected and singular, this anthology is a tribute and a sheer delight.