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
A phantasmagorical collection of short stories and reimagined
tales, not unlike Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado.
*Guardian*
Sometimes disturbing, often humorous, but always unapologetically
feminist… a deeply, brilliantly macabre, visceral collection which
pulls very few punches.
*BBC Radio 4 Open Book*
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*
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*
These short stories are fiercely funny and feminist and mix the
everyday with the supernatural.
*Red*
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*
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.
*The Saturday Paper (Australia)*
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.
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