Of all contemporary writers, Simpson has the most honest, the most authentic voice

Her stories can be read quickly, knocked back in a single, grateful gulp like an aperitif, or savoured with a slow, cool intoxication... She is Katherine Mansfield's natural successor

Biting wit...has me laughing aloud

Simpson's wit defies formulaic feminism or, indeed, any other -ism... Very, very funny

Full of good jokes, wonderfully alert to irony and the possibilities of language

Effortless charm, wit and vivid sexual detail

This is Simpson's real charm - that she believes in love... Her heady sense of almost physical joy

These stories are shockingly bold and macabrely funny, powerfully defamiliarising the cultural lore of patriarchy. What makes them special is their lack of interest in representing women as victims – here, the taboo of feminist anger is flagrantly and entertainingly broken.

Intan Paramaditha, who mixes fairy tales and gothic ghost stories with feminist and political issues, shakes up her readers, showing that her fiction is not beholden to a single interpretation. Her short stories reveal that the most terrifying thing in life is not one of the supernatural ghosts that populate her work, but human prejudice. As far as I’m concerned, only writers of genius are able to convey a layered and nuanced world, and Paramaditha is one of them.

Intan Paramaditha has turned the fairy tale on its head. Instead of helpless maidens, these fables are bursting with fierce and fabulous females, determined to exact justice in an unjust world. As the enigmatic title suggests, the writing is juicy and incisive. Every story is a gem and, as with all good fairy tales, there are important lessons to be learned.

Apple and Knife challenges contemporary national ideas about womanhood. All the stories in this book speak of distinctive aspects of women’s lives, and peel off the myths surrounding them.

The stories in Apple and Knife are raw, fun, excessive, and told with a wink, but they are underlaid with an unsettling awareness of the common fate of “disobedient women”.

Denis Johnson was and is and will continue to be one of our strongest writers. His work has an indigenous beat that marks it as unmistakably American.

Denis Johnson was and is, without question, significant and great.

Everyone who reads Denis Johnson comes away thinking he has spoken directly to some wracked and ragged, yet transcendent, aspect of their own secret heart.

His prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity.

Nobody wrote with more brutality and mercy, more hilarity and grace. What a genius he was.

[Denis Johnson’s] writing is life enhancing, like being suddenly hit by a marvellous trick of the light. I urge you to read this. I can’t imagine anyone with any kind of sensitivity to words or people not enjoying it.

Blistering, brilliant.

A true American artist ... a revelator for this still new century.

A dizzying mix of humour and near tragedy that leaves us unsure whether to laugh or weep… For too long, Denis Johnson was not sufficiently appreciated. A fine novelist and poet, as well as one of the best short story writers of his generation.

An instant classic…A masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose…. It's filled with Johnson's unparalleled ability to inject humor, profundity, and beauty—often all three—into the dark and the mundane alike. These characters have been pushed toward the edge; through their searches for meaning or clawing just to hold onto life, Johnson is able to articulate what it means to be alive, and to have hope.

Like a good rock song, a typical Denis Johnson sentence describes, with total precision, what an emotion feels like … Johnson has sometimes been compared to Ernest Hemingway for his creation of a distinctive American idiom.

Denis Johnson was the best American writer of the past twenty-five years.

He was the kind of writer who comes along once in a generation, if that often: a true original, in the same league as Melville and Whitman.

Here are stories that feel generously improvised but never haphazard, uncanny but earthy, reconciled to the passing of time but themselves out of time. Few books so relentlessly concerned with death feel so relentlessly alive.

Denis Johnson writes short stories like no one has ever done before. He makes the normal electric; the everyday enormous. There is not a single word here that does not hit you square in the face and say: look, this is what it's about, this is what you need to know.

Denis Johnson’s stories are astonishing… they dash between quicksilver wit and gallows humour, twinning the superficial with the profound so elegantly. His sentences are exquisite, often having the capacity to sock a sudden punch. The last story made me gasp.

[An] absorbing collection of deceptively rambling, craftily casual tales ... Magical stuff.

Sometimes streetwise and tough, and always informal, light, elegant and miraculously tender.

The late Denis Johnson is arguably the most influential American prose writer of the last thirty years ... and in the posthumously published The Largess of the Sea Maiden it is blindingly clear why.

The five darkly comic stories that comprise The Largesse of the Sea Maiden are befitting final testaments to [Johnson’s] wild originality... His sentences, like his plots, are full of gorgeous little shocks.

How to sum up? It's... mind-blowing. Seriously. A lifetime book

[You Know You Want This captures] the torturous and complicated justifications for untoward behaviour in the search for closeness and connection.

What unites the collection is less her [Roupenian’s] gender politics than her interest in the way fantasies become distorted, disappointing, even dangerous when they approach reality… narrative twist[s] changes the direction of a story and leads it somewhere new. Roupenian’s desire to have her moral and reject it too could be said to put a twist on the twist.

Roupenian remains rooted in realism, she gives pause by exposing the sinister side of sexuality, and one looks forward to seeing what she might accomplish with the novel form.

Kristen Roupenian's debut short stories fulfil all expectations… she infuses mundane reality with a thrilling layer of menace.

One of the most anticipated story collections of the year.

Violence, cruelty or misunderstanding are never far away in these 12 stories, which are by turns, unsettling, ruthless and often funny.

Walker’s laconic, Hemingway-esque prose style perfectly complements his low-key approach to his material: the matter-of-fact tone in which he recalls his most horrific experiences in Iraq makes them seem all the more horrible. It works equally well with deadpan humour.

Roupenian is a wizard of provocative, psychological fiction, exploring the dark side of the human psyche. Each of her short stories is terrifyingly relatable, making the reader fear something much more relevant than more supernatural horror stories.

A fascinating and repugnant series of stories, all tremendous examples of what this unsung hero of a literary form can do.

Roupenian’s wildly discomfiting new collection, You Know You Want This… is often wonderfully, if grotesquely, physical… This book isn’t bedtime reading.

These are stories that make you feel fascinated but repelled, scared but delighted, revolted but aroused.

You Know You Want This is an alarming but compelling book. Roupenian’s short stories, weaving together science fiction, confession and fantasy, are like infections spreading across the senses, blocking out everything except the compulsion to read on… Roupenian achieves something few other writers have: providing a balanced reflection on a very difficult subject.

A new collection of stories that explores the complex - and often darkly funny - connections between gender, sex, and power across genres.