‘ Panthers & the Museum of Fire is genuinely fresh, radical, exciting, brave and utterly self-aware. ‘There is so much that is intriguing in Panthers…Jen Craig is concerned with both loss of memory and the falsification of experience and she explores her themes through the technique he pioneered, a hypnotic “mash-up” of fact and fiction.’ Catherine Skipper, South Sydney Herald Panthers and the Museum of Fire is her second book. Her first novel, Since the Accident, was published in 2009. She collaborated with the composers of the chamber opera A Dictionary of Maladies in Switzerland in 2005. Jen Craig’s short stories have appeared in publications including HEAT and Southerly. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance through a brush with religion, her anorexia, the exercise of that power when she was powerless in every other aspect of her life. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator’s entire world: life with family and neighbours, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations and work. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney cafe to return a manuscript by a recently-dead writer. Panther & the Museum of Fire is a novella about walking, memory and writing. The unpretentious truths and agonies, soul-searching and tenuous self-regard of the artist’s life are brilliantly and immediately depicted, in writing that deploys European modernist literary techniques in an Australian setting. In Jen Craig’s novella, voice, character and vocation combine in a sophisticated and accessible narrative.
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