Panthers and the Museum of Fire

$13.95
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A woman starts out from a quiet corner of Glebe in Sydney, Australia toward the bustle of Broadway and Surry Hills, carrying with her the manuscript of a child friend who has recently died. Her thoughts surge between past and present as she strives to understand the effect her friend’s manuscript, Panthers and the Museum of Fire, has had on her. Not only does the manuscript remind her of what she might prefer to forget—youthful ambitions, an abandoned friendship, entanglements with religion and anorexia—it also ignites in her a creative impulse.

JEN CRAIG’s short stories have appeared in various Australian literary magazines including HEAT, Redoubt, Hermes and Southerly. Her first novel, Since the Accident, was published by Ginninderra Press in 2009. She has collaborated on concert and theatre works, including the 2005 chamber opera, A Dictionary of Maladies, with Swiss composer Michael Schneider. Jen regularly blogs micro fiction at absurdenticements.blogspot.com and about writing and reading at beinginlieu.blogspot.com. She holds a Master of Arts in Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney, and is currently researching the relationship between writing, anorexia and the Gothic at the Writing and Society Research Centre, University of Western Sydney.

BETTINA KAISER is a visual artist as well as a graphic and web designer. She has undertaken artistic residencies in Antartica, at Arthur and Yvonne Boyd’s Bundanon and in Outback Australia. She won the 2007 Hazelhurst Art on Paper Prize and has exhibited throughout Australia as well as overseas.

Reviews

“You’re in the midst of a conversation, which is my favorite kind on Bookworm, with a writer who may be making her way into World Literature…. I found this novel to be an immense, rich, and complex pleasure. I read it three times.”

—Michael Silverblatt, BOOKWORM, 89.9 FM, KCRW

“Jen Craig’s voice is a rare one in the field of emerging Australian literary talent. Both her novels, Since the Accident and Panthers and the Museum of Fire, exhibit a distinctive style which features careful precision of the narrative voice, coupled with an intriguing digressive approach. This draws the reader in to stories that seem endlessly reflective, yet the novels quickly display a logic and continuity that is sustained until the very last sentence.”

—DEBRA ADELAIDE, author of Letter to George Clooney

“Panthers and the Museum of Fire will be among my top reads for the year. Bold, original and urgent, it is a complex work of fictionalised-memoir in the style of writers such as Karl Ove Knausgård and Sheila Heti.”

—Angie Andrewes, Bookseller & Publisher

“…the reader is made aware at once that Craig is a writer of great skill.”

—Kerryn Goldsworthy

“Panthers and the Museum of Fire defies every piece of well-meant advice handed out to novelists. The language is strange and obsessive, its central character is written with no regard as to whether the reader will like or care about her, the plot is obscure and frustrating, the setting is never picturesque. And yet it succeeds brilliantly.”

—Ali Jane Smith

“The reader emerges from all this as if into sunlight after a long, intense conversation at the back of a café with an earnest friend.”

—RAIN TAXI, Winter 2020

“The distinct scenes of this book… weave in and out of Jen’s progress across the meticulously rendered landscape of [Sydney] proper as her thoughts spiral, double-back, wallow, and soar.”

—KIRKUS REVIEW, September 1, 2020

“Panthers and the Museum of Fire is an internal foray into consciousness-driven modernist writing and is easily a beautiful addition to the Knausgaard/Ellman/Ferrante genre.”

—Garrett Zecker, THE COLLIDESCOPE, 10/16/2022