'Excitable girls rush out to meet life; what could go wrong? A masterful debut about the terrifying thrills of innocence from a voice of experience.
'Teenagers sneak out to the creek for a wild New Year's Eve party. A sleep-deprived woman who imagines she is pregnant to a Viking faces her scathing sixteen-year-old self. A woman in love wakes up in a van Gogh painting.
'These gem-like stories are about the desire to rush out and meet life; about getting in over your head; about danger, and damage, and what it means to survive – and not always survive – the risk of being young. They chart the borderlands between girls and women, daughters and mothers, freedom and fear.
'Emerging fully-formed and singing songs of both innocence and experience, Anne Casey-Hardy is the rarest of new voices: at the same time reckless and entirely in control; funny and frightening; wise and full-blooded.' (Publication summary)
'An assured debut collection of short stories for and about women.'
'Anne Casey-Hardy’s Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls and Else Fitzgerald’s Everything Feels like the End of the World share feminist concerns. But while both use the short-story collection to explore latent social violence and collective anxieties, they are dramatically distinct.' (Introduction)
'There’s a theory that short fiction is the perfect panacea for modern life. As our attention spans grow weak on a diet of digital gruel and as our free time clogs up with late-night work emails, enter the short story as an efficient fiction-booster administered daily on the commute between suburb and CBD. I love this theory, and I will forever resent Jane Rawson for exposing its flaws in a 2018 Overland article on the subject. Rawson explains that most time-poor readers prefer to dip in and out of long novels, where they can greet familiar worlds without the awkward orientation period required by a new text. In contrast, says Rawson, collections of ‘stories plunge you back into that icy pool of not-knowing every 500, 800, 2000 or 5000 words. Who wants that? Pretty much no-one, if bestseller lists are anything to go by.’' (Introduction)
'There’s a theory that short fiction is the perfect panacea for modern life. As our attention spans grow weak on a diet of digital gruel and as our free time clogs up with late-night work emails, enter the short story as an efficient fiction-booster administered daily on the commute between suburb and CBD. I love this theory, and I will forever resent Jane Rawson for exposing its flaws in a 2018 Overland article on the subject. Rawson explains that most time-poor readers prefer to dip in and out of long novels, where they can greet familiar worlds without the awkward orientation period required by a new text. In contrast, says Rawson, collections of ‘stories plunge you back into that icy pool of not-knowing every 500, 800, 2000 or 5000 words. Who wants that? Pretty much no-one, if bestseller lists are anything to go by.’' (Introduction)
'Anne Casey-Hardy’s Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls and Else Fitzgerald’s Everything Feels like the End of the World share feminist concerns. But while both use the short-story collection to explore latent social violence and collective anxieties, they are dramatically distinct.' (Introduction)
'An assured debut collection of short stories for and about women.'
