Who doesn’t love books? A hundred thousand words jammed pack into an adhesive-bound pocket of delight with pages that smell like heaven (yeah, you know what smell I’m talking about). Her weird, original stories reveal the darkness behind old tales and the shadows lurking at the edges of modern life.Ah, books.

“Deliciously dark and expertly disturbing, Intan Paramaditha’s compelling Apple and Knife will haunt you. Melanie Cheng, author of Australia Day, winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award Every story is a gem and, as with all good fairytales, there are important lessons to be learned.” As the enigmatic title suggests, the writing is juicy and incisive. Instead of helpless maidens, these fables are bursting with fierce and fabulous females, determined to exact justice in an unjust world. “In Apple and Knife, Intan Paramaditha has turned the fairytale on its head. As far as I’m concerned, only writers of genius are able to convey a layered and nuanced world, and Intan is one of them.”Įka Kurniawan, internationally acclaimed author of Beauty is a Wound and Man Tiger, Man Booker International Prize 2016 finalist 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. Women carve a place for themselves in this world, finding ways to subvert norms or enacting brutalities on themselves and each other. In the globally connected and fast-developing Indonesia of Apple and Knife, taboos, inversions, sex and death all come together in a heady, intoxicating mix full of pointed critiques and bloody mutilations. Solihin would give anything to make dangdut singer Salimah his wife – anything at all. Jamal falls in love with the rich and powerful Bambang, but it is the era of the smiling general and, if he’s not careful, he may find himself recruited to Bambang’s brutal cause. Mara finds herself brainstorming an ad campaign for Free Maxi Pads, with a little help from the menstruation-eating hag of her childhood. Sometimes wacky and always engrossing, 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. These short fictions set in the Indonesian everyday-in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns, on dangdut stages-reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface.

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.

Apple and knife intan paramaditha