Apple and Knife
Intan Paramaditha
translated by Stephen J. Epstein
First published by Brow Books in Australia, March 2018.
FORMAT: Paperback
LENGTH: 208 pp.
ISBN: 9781925704006
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 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. 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.
Mara finds herself brainstorming an ad campaign for Free Maxi Pads, with a little help from the menstruation-eating hag of her childhood. 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. Solihin would give anything to make dangdut singer Salimah his wife – anything at all.
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. Women carve a place for themselves in this world, finding ways to subvert norms or enacting brutalities on themselves and each other.
“Sometimes disturbing, often humorous, but always unapologetically feminist... a deeply, brilliantly macabre, visceral collection which pulls very few punches.
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“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. ”
“The stories in Apple and Knife are raw, fun, excessive, and told with a wink, but they are underlaid with an unsettling awareness of the common fate of “disobedient women”.”
Apple and Knife (UK edition)
Harvill Secker
Hardback, December 2018
Vintage
Paperback, September 2019
“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.
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“Dark, subversive... Here are fairy tales and myths reworked with a feminist bent.”
“**A The White Review Book of the Year**”
