Intan Paramaditha has turned the fairy tale on its head. 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 are women with swagger, and as such this is a collection for Lilith, not for Eve. These short stories are fiercely funny and feminist and mix the everyday with the supernatural.Ĭatalogued here are powerful, disobedient women who misbehave, following their own desires over the dictates of society. Here are fairytales and myths reworked with a feminist bent, with plenty of blood, revenge and horror thrown in. a deeply, brilliantly macabre, visceral collection which pulls very few punches.ĭark, subversive. Sometimes disturbing, often humorous, but always unapologetically feminist. These darkly humorous, sometimes viscerally violent tales are inspired by horror stories, exploring taboos and the female body in the modern world. Read more only writers of genius are able to convey a layered and nuanced world, and Paramaditha is one of them.Įka Kurniawan A sharply subversive feminist retread of fairy tales and myths. 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. 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. Dark, humorous, and vividly realised, Apple and Knife brings together taboos, inversions, sex and death in a heady, intoxicating mix. 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. Read more stages - reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. These stories set in the Indonesian everyday - in corporate boardrooms, shanty towns, on dangdut. 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.

**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. Description for Apple and Knife Hardcover.

The wandering intan paramaditha