A host of short story collections photographed against a red background

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Reading lists

12 short story collections to sink into

Apple and Knife

A dazzling and provocative debut story collection from celebrated Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha, putting fierce and fabulous female characters centre stage in brilliantly funny and sharp twists on fairy tale.

A phantasmagorical collection of short stories and reimagined tales, not unlike Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado.

Sometimes disturbing, often humorous, but always unapologetically feminist… a deeply, brilliantly macabre, visceral collection which pulls very few punches.

Dark, subversive... Here are fairytales and myths reworked with a feminist bent, with plenty of blood, revenge and horror thrown in... A fun – if unsettling – collection.

A sharply subversive feminist retread of fairy tales and myths. These darkly humorous, sometimes viscerally violent tales are inspired by horror stories, exploring taboos and the female body in the modern world.

These short stories are fiercely funny and feminist and mix the everyday with the supernatural.

Apple and Knife delivers a short sharp suite of tales. It would be tempting to describe the volume as feminist horror, though undercurrents of violence and misogyny, myth and madness don't stop it smouldering with black comedy and flickering into moments of unexpected victory. The author throws us into the cauldron of contemporary Indonesia through an eclectic cast of characters – we encounter everyone from musicians to corporate high-flyers to witches.

Catalogued here are powerful, disobedient women who misbehave, following their own desires over the dictates of society. These are women with swagger, and as such this is a collection for Lilith, not for Eve... Paramaditha’s nimble work ducks and dives, weaving the campy, gothic, and visceral into the weft of societally-conditioned expectations of femininity in order to create warped tapestries of female deviance, going some way towards queer depictions of women in all their transforming, glitchy glory.

These stories are shockingly bold and macabrely funny, powerfully defamiliarising the cultural lore of patriarchy. What makes them special is their lack of interest in representing women as victims – here, the taboo of feminist anger is flagrantly and entertainingly broken.

Intan Paramaditha, who mixes fairy tales and gothic ghost stories with feminist and political issues, shakes up her readers, showing that her fiction is not beholden to a single interpretation. Her short stories reveal that the most terrifying thing in life is not one of the supernatural ghosts that populate her work, but human prejudice. As far as I’m concerned, only writers of genius are able to convey a layered and nuanced world, and Paramaditha is one of them.

Intan Paramaditha has turned the fairy tale on its head. Instead of helpless maidens, these fables are bursting with fierce and fabulous females, determined to exact justice in an unjust world. As the enigmatic title suggests, the writing is juicy and incisive. Every story is a gem and, as with all good fairy tales, there are important lessons to be learned.

Apple and Knife challenges contemporary national ideas about womanhood. All the stories in this book speak of distinctive aspects of women’s lives, and peel off the myths surrounding them.

The stories in Apple and Knife are raw, fun, excessive, and told with a wink, but they are underlaid with an unsettling awareness of the common fate of “disobedient women”.

A dazzling, provocative debut story collection from celebrated Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha, putting fierce female characters centre stage in brilliantly funny and sharp twists on fairy tale. 
 
 ‘Dark, subversive... Here are fairy tales and myths reworked with a feminist bent’ Tatler 
 
Inspired by horror fiction, myths and fairy tales, Apple and Knife is an unsettling ride that swerves into the supernatural to explore the dangers and power of occupying a female body in today’s world. 
 
These stories set in the Indonesian everyday – in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns, on dangdut stages – reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. This is subversive feminist horror at its best, where men and women alike are arbiters of fear, and where revenge is sometimes sweetest when delivered from the grave. 
 
Dark, humorous, and vividly realised, Apple and Knife brings together taboos, inversions, sex and death in a heady, intoxicating mix.

Intan Paramaditha

Stephen J Epstein

*The most unusual novel you will read all year, where you create your own story* 
 
'An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge' Lauren Elkin, Guardian 
 
Longlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize 
 
You've grown roots, you're gathering moss. You're desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go. 
 
Turn the page and make your choice. 
 
You may become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet other travellers with their own stories to tell. Freedom awaits but borders are real. And no story is ever new. 
 
'Sets you free to roam the Earth... an incisive commentary on the cosmopolitan condition' Tiffany Tsao 
 
'An electrifying novel about cosmopolitanism and global nomadism that keeps readers on their toes' Book Riot 
 
Winner of an English PEN Translates Award, and a Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America

Intan Paramaditha

The Wandering

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