'The brilliant new short story collection from the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of The Animals in That Country.
'A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.
'With her trademark humour, energy, and flair, McKay offers hallucinogenic glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans behave like animals and animals talk like humans.
'The stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerising ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph: Ah if life were not so fragile,
Death not so permanent - Ross McKay, 1977
'If pressed, I would describe Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower as a collection of stories about bodies. Divided into three sections—‘birth’, ‘life’ and ‘death’—the stories explore the way bodies, with all their needs and desires, are controlled, exploited and disregarded. Yet I like that this doesn’t quite get to the heart of them, that these stories don’t fit together as neatly as that.' (Introduction)
(Introduction)
(Introduction)
'If pressed, I would describe Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower as a collection of stories about bodies. Divided into three sections—‘birth’, ‘life’ and ‘death’—the stories explore the way bodies, with all their needs and desires, are controlled, exploited and disregarded. Yet I like that this doesn’t quite get to the heart of them, that these stories don’t fit together as neatly as that.' (Introduction)
Laura Jean McKay on Writing Our Present and Future
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2023
26992316
2023
single work
podcast
interview
'Laura Jean McKay is a fiction writer, and her latest work is the short story collection Gunflower. Her previous novel, The Animals in That Country, was awarded the international Arthur C. Clarke Award, as well as the Victorian Prize for Literature and the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year. Laura was awarded the NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022.' (Introduction)
