'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”.' (Emily Bitto The Monthly) All the stories in this book speak of distinctive aspects of women’s lives, and peel off the myths surrounding them.' (Norman Erikson Pasaribu Mekong Review) ' Apple and Knife challenges contemporary national ideas about womanhood. Every story is a gem and, as with all good fairy tales, there are important lessons to be learned.' (Melanie Cheng) 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. '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.' ( Strange Horizons) These are women with swagger, and as such this is a collection for Lilith, not for Eve. 'Catalogued here are powerful, disobedient women who misbehave, following their own desires over the dictates of society. 'These short stories are fiercely funny and feminist and mix the everyday with the supernatural.' ( Red) A fun – if unsettling – collection.' ( Tatler)

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.' (Mariella Frostrup BBC Radio 4 Open Book) '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.' ( i)

' A sharply subversive feminist retread of fairy tales and myths. 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) 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.

Intan paramaditha apple and knife