Apple and Knife

byIntan Paramaditha, Stephen J Epstein (Translator)

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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.

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

Matthew Janney, Guardian

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.

Sydney Morning Herald

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.

Strange Horizons

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.

Eka Kurniawan

About Intan Paramaditha

Intan Paramaditha is a writer and academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker, Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction Prize in Indonesia, the English PEN Translates Award and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short-story collection Apple and Knife and editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series by Tilted Axis Press. Her essay 'On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel' was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a PhD from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. intanparamaditha.com

Details

Imprint: Vintage
Published: 05/09/2019
ISBN: 9781784709792
Length: 192 pages
Dimensions: 197mm x 13mm x 130mm
Weight: 141g
Price: £9.99

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Apple and Knife

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