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Imprint: Vintage
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Published: 05/09/2019
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ISBN: 9781784709792
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Length: 192 Pages
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RRP: £8.99
**A The White Review Book of the Year**
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.
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, 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.
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Imprint: Vintage
-
Published: 05/09/2019
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ISBN: 9781784709792
-
Length: 192 Pages
-
RRP: £8.99
Reviews
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"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
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"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."
i
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"Sometimes disturbing, often humorous, but always unapologetically feminist… a deeply, brilliantly macabre, visceral collection which pulls very few punches."
Mariella Frostrup, BBC Radio 4 Open Book
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"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."
Tatler
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"These short stories are fiercely funny and feminist and mix the everyday with the supernatural."
Red
