Author talk with Paul Dalla Rosa

Oscillating between elation and despair, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is the debut short story collection from Sunday Times Short Story Award finalist Paul Dalla Rosa.

Whether working in food service or in high-end retail, lit by a laptop in a sex chat or by the camera of an acclaimed film director, sharing a dangerous apartment in the city, a rooming house in China or a vacation rental in Mallorca, the protagonists of the ten stories comprising Paul Dalla Rosa's debut collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, navigate the spaces between aspiration and delusion, ambition and aimlessness, the curated profile and the unreliable body.  By turns unsparing and tender, Dalla Rosa explores our lives in late-stage capitalism, where globalisation and its false promises of connectivity and equity leave us all further alienated and disenfranchised. His stories are small masterpieces of regret, futility and tenderness, dripping with acuity, irony and wit.  Like his acclaimed contemporary Ottessa Moshfegh and the legendary Lucia Berlin, Dalla Rosa is a masterful observer and unflinching eviscerator of our ugly, beautiful attempts at finding meaning in an ugly, beautiful world.

About Paul

Paul Dalla Rosa is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. His stories have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Meanjin and New York Tyrant. In 2019, his story 'Comme' was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. He is currently undertaking his PhD at RMIT University, studying 'the real' within contemporary fiction. An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is his debut collection.

About Madeleine 

Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. Her debut novel, Green Dot, is forthcoming with Allen & Unwin in 2023. She was a 2021 Finalist for the Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism, and has written for such publications as Overland, Meanjin, The Monthly, SRB, and the TLS. She has an MSt in English Literature from the University of Oxford and is a current doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester.