Peter Cowan is an Australian short-fiction writer, novelist, biographer, and editor whose published work spans a period from the early 1940s to the 1990s. He has established a reputation both as a modernist and as a regional Western Australian author. Cowan's largest contribution in the first half of his career was in short fiction: his first, second, and fourth books were collections of stories. A lifelong fascination with formal experiment in short fiction brought him to publish a total of six collections and a volume of selected stories. Cowan has also published five novels and two biographies. He was an assiduous and influential editor of the literary journal Westerly from the 1970s to the early 1990s, and he edited or co-edited colonial diaries and letters together with a variety of anthologies. Although Cowan can be described as a "man of letters," he has never been a socializer, and...