'A fox could be a shape-shifter, a spirit being. It could appear in human form if this suited its purposes; it could come and go as it pleased, play tricks, lead men astray.’
'A film director in Hackney with a fox problem in her garden; an escapee from a cult in Japan; a Sydney café-owner rekindling an old flame; an English tutor who gets too close to an oligarch; a journalist on Mars, face-to-face with his fate.
'The world has taught these men and women to live off their wits. They know how to play smart, but what happens when they need to be wise?
'In the Time of Foxes is both compellingly readable and deeply insightful about the times in which we live, each narrative a compressed novel. With an exhilarating span of people and places, woven together by the most mercurial of animals, it shows the short story collection at its most entertaining and rewarding, and introduces Jo Lennan as a captivating new storyteller.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Live Recording : Jo Lennan on In the Time of Foxes
Ben Ball
(interviewer),
2020
23472930
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Jo Lennan chats with her publisher Ben Ball about her exciting debut story collection, In the Time of Foxes. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.' (Production introduction)
'In a 1954 letter to his niece Pippa, artist-nomad Ian Fairweather lamented that he could not write with sufficient analytic detachment to look back at his life and ‘see a pattern in it’. (Ian Fairweather: A life in letters, Text Publishing, 2019). The irony – that one of Australian art’s most profound, intuitive pattern-makers should be ruefully unable to ‘see’ the formative structures and repetitions of his fraught life – would not be lost on Amanda Lohrey. Labyrinth, her haunting new novel, is a meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in familial relations, and our experience of them in time. But this is a novel, not a treatise, its narrative so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs. It is a work to read slowly, and reread, so that its metaphorical patterns can come into focus, and the intricate knots of structure loosen and unwind.' (Introduction)
'Predator or prey? Jo Lennan’s debut collection of stories lures the reader into a world where foxes can mean many things.' (Introduction)
'“In London, where Nina lived, it was the time of foxes.” So begins Australian author Jo Lennan’s book of short stories. But if In the Time of Foxes starts like a fairytale, it reads more like a treatise on the grittiness – the small disappointments, the big injustices, as well as the joys – of everyday life.' (Introduction)
'Predator or prey? Jo Lennan’s debut collection of stories lures the reader into a world where foxes can mean many things.' (Introduction)
'In a 1954 letter to his niece Pippa, artist-nomad Ian Fairweather lamented that he could not write with sufficient analytic detachment to look back at his life and ‘see a pattern in it’. (Ian Fairweather: A life in letters, Text Publishing, 2019). The irony – that one of Australian art’s most profound, intuitive pattern-makers should be ruefully unable to ‘see’ the formative structures and repetitions of his fraught life – would not be lost on Amanda Lohrey. Labyrinth, her haunting new novel, is a meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in familial relations, and our experience of them in time. But this is a novel, not a treatise, its narrative so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs. It is a work to read slowly, and reread, so that its metaphorical patterns can come into focus, and the intricate knots of structure loosen and unwind.' (Introduction)
Live Recording : Jo Lennan on In the Time of Foxes
Ben Ball
(interviewer),
2020
23472930
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Jo Lennan chats with her publisher Ben Ball about her exciting debut story collection, In the Time of Foxes. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.' (Production introduction)
