In the story, the narrator recounts, rather graphically, how she became blind to a young child companion: ‘My eyes were pecked out by a bird. The first story, ‘The Blind Woman Without a Toe’, is a retelling of Cinderella (renamed Sindelerat), which is told from the perspective of one of her sisters. Australian author Emily Bitto writes that 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 human fate of “disobedient women”.’Īs one would expect, given Bitto’s comments, the collection launches straight into the darker side of life.
Paramaditha’s tales are inspired by fairytales, mythological stories, and horror, and this collection promises its readers an ‘unsettling ride that swerves into the supernatural to explore the dangers and power of occupying a female body in today’s world.’ Its blurb also claims that the collection ‘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.’Īpple and Knife is a slim collection of thirteen stories, many of which have quite beguiling titles ‘The Blind Woman Without a Toe’, ‘Scream in a Bottle’, and ‘A Single Firefly, a Thousand Rats’ particularly caught my eye. Animism lingers in these selected Southeast Asian stories that center around “hantu,” the Malay word meaning “ghost” or “spirit.” Here are ten books in which ghosts manifest themselves in vampires, virtuous spirits, and more-all set in Southeast Asia and told by the prominent Southeast Asian writers of our time.The stories in Apple and Knife, the first English collection of award-winning Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha’s work have been drawn from two of her books, and are translated by Stephen J. So these ghost-story novels and collections from Southeast Asian writers feel familiar to me: they deal with the same restless spirits and the same sense of displacement. These ghost stories had to do with diaspora-characters, living or not living, wandering the earth and navigating the conflicts of displacement.
My parents often loosely improvised “scary” stories about ancient ghosts from the Hebrew Bible and old Korean folktales, in which spirits manifested themselves in ways that weren’t always malicious or evil.
These stories were often used to teach me lessons on how to behave and live however, instead of malevolent ghosts looking to terrorize people for their misdoings, I was more interested in ghosts who haunted people with the intention of connecting with them.
Of the bedtime stories my parents told me, I took the most interest in the ones involving ghosts and spirits. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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